Not Stolen - Jeff Fynn-Paul (Annotated).pdf (file not included in this release)

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A renowned historian debunks current distortion and myths about European colonialism in the New World and restores much needed balance to our understanding of the past. Was America really “stolen” from the Indians? Was Columbus a racist? Were Indians really peace-loving, communistic environmentalists? Did Europeans commit “genocide” in the New World? It seems that almost everyone—from CNN to the New York Times to angry students pulling down statues of our founders—believes that America’s history is a shameful tale of racism, exploitation, and cruelty. In Not Stolen, renowned historian Jeff Fynn-Paul systematically dismantles this relentlessly negative view of U.S. history, arguing that it is based on shoddy methods, misinformation, and outright lies about the past. America was not “stolen” from the Indians but fairly purchased piece by piece in a thriving land market. Nor did European settlers cheat, steal, murder, rape or purposely infect them with smallpox to the extent that most people believe. No genocide occurred—either literal or cultural—and the decline of Native populations over time is not due to violence but to assimilation and natural demographic processes. Fynn Paul not only debunks these toxic myths, but provides a balanced portrait of this complex historical process over 500 years. The real history of Native and European relations will surprise you. Not only is this not a tale of shameful sins and crimes against humanity—it is more inspiring than you ever dared to imagine.

My Summary

Main Ideas, Takeaways & Similarities

Questions

I. What is the problem?
A. How is this problem formulated?
B. Why is this problem important?
C. What is the history of this problem?
D. Which prominent personalities have been interested in this problem?

II. What solutions to the problem are there?
A. What are the conclusions reached?
B. By what argument(s) is the conclusion reached?
C. What facts or assumptions serve as premises?
D. When a prominent personality offers a solution, does he also argue for or against other prominent personalities? Does he raise objections to alternative solutions? Does he consider objections to his own solutions?

III. Evaluation
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative formulations to the problem?
B. Has the importance or history of the problem ever been misrepresented?
C. Are the solutions logically related to the premises?
D. Are the facts true? Are the assumptions acceptable? Are the objections answerable?

AI Summary

Highlights

Not Stolen - Jeff Fynn-Paul (Misc copy).pdf (file not included in this release)

Summary

Here is a thorough summary of the main ideas in Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World by Jeff Fynn-Paul, based on the introduction and first chapters of the book:

🧱 CENTRAL THESIS

Jeff Fynn-Paul’s Not Stolen challenges the dominant historical narrative that European colonization of the Americas was primarily a story of genocide, racism, and land theft. He argues:

The term “stolen land” oversimplifies and distorts history.
The United States and Canada were not founded on illegitimacy, nor was there a centrally planned genocide of Indigenous peoples.
Most current radical views about colonialism originate not from the facts of history, but from Marxist-inspired ideological reinterpretations that gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s.

⚔️ INTRODUCTION: THE RADICAL ASSAULT ON WESTERN HISTORY

The 2020 Shift

Protests and statue topplings (e.g., George Washington, Columbus) were symbolic of a new cultural moment, where Western civilization’s traditional heroes were recast as villains.
Fynn-Paul sees this as driven by an increasingly radicalized intellectual class, especially in academia and media, which promotes guilt, division, and revisionism.

Identity History

He critiques what he calls “identity historians,” who reduce complex historical dynamics into binary narratives of oppressors (white Europeans) and oppressed (everyone else).
These narratives, influenced by critical race theory, intersectionality, and postcolonial studies, have become dominant in public discourse.

🧭 COLUMBUS AND THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

A Misunderstood Figure

Columbus is portrayed today as a genocidal colonizer, but Fynn-Paul argues that:
- He admired Indigenous intelligence and generosity.
- He hoped to integrate Native peoples into Spanish society as equal spiritual and social beings under Christianity.
- He advocated conversion by love, not force.

Misdeeds and Mismanagement

Columbus was a poor governor and allowed chaos and exploitation, but he was not a uniquely cruel figure for his time.
The vast majority of Indigenous deaths (90% or more) were caused by disease (smallpox, influenza), not murder or slavery.

The Slavery Question

Columbus did authorize the enslavement of some “rebellious” Indians—but:
- This was rare.
- Queen Isabella strongly opposed it and freed the slaves, punishing those who disobeyed.
The encomienda system, often blamed for atrocities, was abused but originally intended as a mutual labor agreement.

☠️ WAS THERE A GENOCIDE?

Radical Claims

Scholars like David Stannard, Ward Churchill, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz claim that tens or even hundreds of millions of Indigenous people were “genocided” by Europeans.
These claims were largely ignored by mainstream historians until the rise of social media and activist-driven academia.

Population Myths

Claims of 100+ million pre-contact Indigenous people are based on wildly inflated estimates (especially from the Berkeley School in the 1970s).
Fynn-Paul argues:
- The New World population in 1491 was likely 14–32 million, not 100+ million.
- Hispaniola had only 200,000–300,000 people, not the 7 million some claim.

Key Drivers of Population Decline

The massive population losses after European contact were mostly from:
- Old World diseases (e.g., smallpox, measles).
- Flight and migration.
- Cultural disruption (leading to lower birth rates).
True massacres and killings were rare and involved thousands, not millions.

The Mestizo World

Many Indigenous people intermarried with Europeans and survived culturally and genetically.
Examples: 61% of Puerto Ricans today have Taino DNA, and Mexico is a successful case of racial mixing and cultural fusion.

🧬 WAS EUROPEAN COLONIALISM DRIVEN BY RACISM?

Race and Prejudice in Historical Context

Modern racism (based on biology and skin color) didn’t exist in the early modern period.
In the 15th–17th centuries:
- Skin color was seen as a result of climate and geography, not race.
- Many Europeans believed that Indigenous people were “white underneath”, and would lighten over time.
- Racism only began to take on its modern form after Darwin and especially with 19th-century pseudo-science and the Nazis.

Islam and Racism

Fynn-Paul claims the Arab world was more explicitly racist toward Africans than Europeans were at the time:
- Arab writers described Africans as inherently inferior and used them as slaves centuries before the Atlantic slave trade began.

📈 POPULATION GEOGRAPHY AND LIMITS

Why the New World Was Less Populated

Geographical constraints limited the growth of New World societies:
- Much of North America was unsuitable for large populations due to climate (Little Ice Age), deserts, jungles, and mountains.
- Only central Mexico and the northern Andes had high population densities.
Technology and agriculture in the Americas were less efficient:
- No ploughs, no animal labor, fewer staple crops.
- Europe and parts of Asia had hundreds of times more calorie output per acre.

🧩 FINAL ARGUMENTS

European colonialism, like all historical phenomena, was complex and morally mixed.
It included moments of violence and injustice—but also integration, trade, shared development, and mutual influence.
To claim that the Americas were “stolen” or founded on “genocide” is to flatten history into ideology.

🎯 PURPOSE OF THE BOOK

Fynn-Paul wants to:

Restore historical nuance to the conversation on colonialism.
Defend the legacy of Western civilization, including its contributions to democracy, science, and human rights.
Encourage reconciliation and shared future rather than division rooted in resentment or guilt.

Would you like me to summarize the next chapters as well, or turn this into something like a Substack-style article or talking points sheet?

Highlight Beginning

Respect for the Indians and their way of life was surprisingly common amongst European-Americans in the later nineteenth century. The Scouting movement was founded on the idea that Indians were role models of bravery, intelligence, honesty and other virtues. Many thousands of Americans dedicated their careers and fortunes to the betterment of Native lives. (Page 1)

Dutch administrators studiously recognized Native land claims as a matter of policy. To the Indians themselves, the mosquito-ridden island was of little value, whereas the “trinkets” they were offered—including textiles, metal tribes tools and weapons—were so life changing that many (Page 1)

intentionally relocated near the coast in order to trade more easily with the newcomers. They even fought wars with other tribes in order to be closer to the Europeans and their trade goods. In any case, neither party had any conception of what the island would become 200 years later, and judgments based on hindsight miss the point entirely. (Page 2)

INTRODUCTION THE RADICAL ASSAULT ON WESTERN HISTORY (Page 3)

O n June 18, 2020, protesters in Portland, Oregon, pulled down a statue of George Washington. With a mixture of ferocity and jubilation, the mob hacked at the efﬁgy until they detached the bronze head of the ﬁrst American president. On the base of the words: “GENOCIDAL COLONIST.” Across the Western world, statues of Columbus, Lincoln, Churchill, and other traditional heroes met similar fates. they spray-painted toppled statue, the (Page 3)

The novelty in 2020 was that for the ﬁrst time, democratically elected leaders of major Western nations were being treated—by their fellow citizens—as though they had been mass murderers and archvillains of history. (Page 3)

By most measures, the United States provides its citizens with more prosperity and opportunity than any nation on Earth. It has the highest per capita wealth of any major nation; the largest average house size after Australia; and despite what the majority of academics and Twitter users seem to believe, it consistently ranks among the most tolerant societies in history.3 The United States has been at the global vanguard of civil rights and equality legislation ever since its Founding Fathers established the ﬁrst modern democratic republic in 1776. Staggering progress towards equality has been made in the last few decades alone. Our collective accomplishments, of which we ought to be so proud, have been painstakingly chronicled by authors such as Stephen Pinker, whose books Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature present page after page of convincing data to this effect. (Page 5)

The economist and public intellectual Thomas Sowell summed up the importance of impartiality in history when he wrote: History is what happened, not what we wish had happened, or what a theory says should have happened. One of the reasons for the great value of history is that it allows us to check our current beliefs against hard facts from around the world and across the centuries. But history cannot be a reality check for today’s fashionable visions when history is itself shaped by those visions. When that happens, we are sealing ourselves up in a closed world of assumptions.4 (Page 6)

A retreat from science to superstition is precisely what led Roman civilization into the Dark Ages; we may yet witness the dawning of a new Dark Age if we learn to discard truth the moment it clashes with our beliefs. (Page 6)

Identity historians assume that modern disparities between racial groups are the result of historical racism. They therefore believe that the only morally acceptable way to write history is to foreground exploitation of nonwhite people by white people. (Page 7)

Explanations of history that fetishize a single cause have not fared well in the past, and I am shocked that so many of my fellow historians have fallen in line behind a new one, yet again. Historical outcomes always have more than one cause. (Page 8)

This book aims at reconciliation and the optimism of a shared and prosperous future, while its detractors encourage factionalism born of nihilism, despair, and a petty desire for point-scoring and personal gain. (Page 8)

The origins of today’s radical anti-Europeanism—the same antiEuropeanism that has gone mainstream in the past few years—lie in the intellectual ferment of the 1960s and ’70s. As New Left campus Marxism reached a high-water mark in the 1970s, Marxist historians began a concerted assault on the foundations of American history. The problem with American history from their perspective was that it made capitalism look too good: American democracy empowered the people; its melting pot welcomed everyone, albeit not without serious friction, and its economic system rewarded hard work more often than not. Marxist historians therefore determined to rewrite American history to show their version of the “truth”: that America was a “system” rooted in unrelenting oppression. (Page 9)

The most famous of these ’70s historians was Howard Zinn. The title of his magnum opus—A People’s History of the United States (Page 9)

But Zinn’s radicalism goes beyond objectivity and straight into the arms of a rigid philosophical dogma. For one thing his key passage quoted above echoes, nearly word for word, the opening lines of chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a in constant word, oppressor and oppressed, stood opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open ﬁght…. (Page 10)

radical revisionists (Page 10)

radicals come to conﬂate democracy with totalitarianism—their ideology makes no distinction between the two (Page 11)

For these radicals, history can only be a zero-sum game where gains by one group lead to loss by the other. In Zinn’s view, history always consists of precisely two groups: the oppressor and the oppressed. (Page 11)

In Zinn’s pessimistic view, oppression rather than freedom was the very foundation of the United States and its Constitution. (Page 11)

critical feminist scholars “discovered” that history revolved around males oppressing females, while critical race theorists discovered that history revolved around the oppression and slavery of black people by white people. Post-colonial theorists accordingly discovered that history revolved around the oppression of Indigenous People by Europeans. Soon, critical “intersectionality” theorists lumped all these identity-based oppressions together, discovering that wealthy, straight, white European males were the ultimate oppressors in history, while poor, black, gay or gender-ﬂuid Indigenous women of color were the ultimate victims. (Page 11)

Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014) (Page 12)

1619 Project, (Page 12)

The result of their stunning success has been a radical change in the public’s perception of global history. (Page 13)

Europe and the West used to be revered not only as the cradle of democracy, but as the home of the Renaissance, the Scientiﬁc Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, constitutional government, women’s suffrage, global abolitionism, the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, human rights, the research university—in short, the foundation of much that is good in modern life. (Page 13)

They have also downplayed the numerous historical horrors that were perpetrated by non-Europeans, including the horrors of slavery within Africa, the horrors of Islamic slavery in Africa—which saw up to ten million Africans trafﬁcked across the Sahara over many centuries —of modern genocides in Asia that have created tens of millions of victims, of longstanding antifeminism in India, and a host of truly awful histories besides. (Page 13)

THE ARGUMENT OF THIS BOOK (Page 13)

Our central argument is that the recent fashion for extreme antirational, balanced, European allegations scientiﬁcally minded people to take seriously. too extreme for is (Page 13)

Widely accepted charges such as “genocide,” mass murder, the primacy of racism and slavery, and the idea that the United States and Canada are (Page 13)

illegitimate because they were founded on “stolen ground” were conﬁned to the radical fringes of the historical profession as recently as a decade ago. (Page 14)

many of these claims can be traced to a handful of radical authors such as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, David Stannard, and Bruce E. Johansen. Particularly when it comes to Indigenous studies, a surprising number of these scholars got their PhDs at West Coast universities in the 1970s, when “Indian studies” was in vogue among white, Left-leaning suburbanites. With these dots having been connected, the new extremism is revealed as the long-discredited, decades-old Marxist dogma that lies at its base. (Page 14)

In the end, we conclude that America was not “stolen,” any more than Europeans were the inventors of slavery or colonialism. Like every modern society, the United States is the result of complex historical factors that resist easy categorization, and we slide into nihilistic generalizations only at great peril to the health of our democracy. (Page 15)

I THE AGE OF DISCOVERY (Page 16)

CHAPTER 1 INTREPID EXPLORER OR GENOCIDAL MANIAC? THE COMPLEX CASE OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (Page 17)

Francis Jennings’s 1975 The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, this story has since made it into mainstream textbooks such as Peter Charles Hoffer’s The Brave New World: A History of Early America, (Page 18)

Columbus becomes a nearly perfect embodiment of everything hated by the Left today. (Page 19)

if only According to this view, Indigenous institutions and mentalities had triumphed over European ones, rather than the other way around, the world today would be a veritable utopia, where all races and genders live in harmony with nature and one another. Because that, in their idealized view, is what New World society was like before Columbus arrived. (Page 19)

Classical Marxism did not give a ﬁg about racism, or gender issues, or environmentalism, but as communism imploded after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Leftists broadened their deﬁnitions of “oppression” in a deliberate move to broaden their appeal to these minority and activist groups. The resulting worldview is so rabidly anti-white, anti-male, and anti-European it challenges the idea of human progress itself. that (Page 20)

WHAT DID COLUMBUS THINK OF THE INDIANS? (Page 20)

We may skip over the fact that our modern version of Columbus’s journal is an extract from a lost original, meaning that we will probably never know the navigator’s actual words. Even so, the passage in question—which is also cited in Zinn’s inﬂuential People’s History—is actually a pastiche of lines that appear several pages apart in Columbus’s original account. Presented as a single passage, they make the speaker look a lot worse than he was. (Page 21)

which most translators render as: “they will make good servants, as they are very clever, and quickly understood everything which was said to them.” Even in the context of an aristocratic system that seems unjust by modern standards, servants are very different from slaves. (Page 21)

Columbus’s glowing appraisal of Indigenous intelligence and their capacity to learn, which can be found in the very same sentence. (Page 21)

reasonable to suggest that what he meant was nearly the opposite of what Monica (and Howard Zinn) implies. Rather than consigning the Indians to perpetual enslavement on the grounds of their irredeemable racial admission into European society as spiritual, racial, and social equals, based on his understanding of them as fellow descendants of Adam and Eve. (On which more appears in chapter 3.) inferiority, Columbus was advocating (Page 22)

We know in hindsight that things did not turn out very well for the Caribbean Indians, so this may sound far-fetched to modern ears. But it is an indisputable historical fact that many Spaniards, including well-placed ﬁgures such as Columbus and Queen Isabella herself, did hope to welcome the Indians as fellow citizens and subjects at many points during the early history of the Spanish Empire. (Page 22)

Columbus’s impression of Native generosity underwent a rapid series of transformations. When the ﬁrst Natives willingly traded pieces of gold for a few glass beads, this was because to them, the beads were so rare and unusual that they were worth more than any gold that they could ﬁnd. Nonetheless, a few encounters later, we ﬁnd Columbus deliberately sending his secretary and other reliable lieutenants to oversee trade between his men and the Indians, in order to ensure that the Spanish did not take undue advantage of the Natives. Soon, however, the Spanish were complaining that the Natives had already learned to drive a hard bargain and would no longer part with things the Spanish found precious or useful without charging a high price. (Page 22)

These initial encounters should be seen for what they were: the ﬁrst exchanges in a market that was not yet fully understood by either side. As modern economists know, a major component of any market is information. What we see in this instance—as in others throughout the colonial period—is the ability of Native Americans to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions in order to maximize their own advantage. They did not stay naive, any longer than the Europeans with whom they traded. (Page 23)

I made signs to ask what it was, and they gave me to understand that people from other adjacent islands [Caribs?] came with the intention of seizing them, and that they defended themselves. (Page 23)

good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe (Page 23)

that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion. (Page 24)

Your Highnesses may believe that there is no better nor gentler people in the world. Your highnesses ought to rejoice that they will soon become Christians, and that they will be taught the good customs of your kingdom. A better race there cannot be, and both the people and the lands are in such quantity that I know not how to write it (Page 24)

Peter Martyr, who was a chief tutor at the Spanish Court with a major inﬂuence on elite opinion, was convinced that the Indians of the Caribbean would prove equal to Europeans in skill and productivity, if only they were given the same technology and skills. (Page 25)

Most conclude that at least some groups of Indians were equal or superior to Europeans in terms of physical beauty, intelligence, and potential for future development. They also believed that some groups of Indians were more fearsome, physically uglier in their opinion, and had less praiseworthy customs. Of one thing we can be sure: this complex picture smashes through easy stereotypes like those proffered by the majority of modern pundits (Page 25)

WHO WAS THE REAL COLUMBUS? (Page 25)

Renaissance Europe was no more hierarchical, patriarchal, or oppressive than any other major civilization. (Page 25)

In Columbus’s day, European society was a chaotic patchwork of jurisdictions and political systems. This included dozens of the world’s only functioning small-scale republics. Many scholars have credited this political fragmentation with creating a fertile ground for entrepreneurialism, a crucible of clashing that eventually gave birth to modern capitalism. It was messy, and it was risky, but it created unequalled opportunities for social mobility, along with technological and scientiﬁc advancement. institutions (Page 26)

in looks rights, in vain for similar occurrences Just a few decades after Columbus landed in the New World, Spain was rocked by a series of urban revolts led by the comuneros, in liberties, and which citizens demanded constitutional freedoms. One the contemporary Islamic or Asiatic worlds. (Page 26)

European society gave administrative and economic power to women at every level of society, from duchesses down to tailors’ widows. The female literacy rate in Renaissance Europe far outstripped anywhere else in the world; Catholicism allowed women to become powerful abbesses; some Protestant sects allowed women to become preachers. Western Europe was—already by Columbus’s day—easily the most “feminist” city-dwelling culture the world had ever known. (Page 26)

father wanted him to become a cloth weaver like himself (Page 26)

experienced some early success (Page 26)

married into a wealthy family (Page 26)

father-in-law—the lord of one of the newly organized European estates on Porto Santo, a previously uninhabited island off the coast of Morocco—served as an example of local lordship and estate management that loomed large in Columbus’s mind. (Page 27)

After many years spent badgering the Iberian monarchs to let him lead an expedition across the Atlantic in search of a passage to Asia, Columbus set sail from Seville in August 1492. (Page 27)

Two months later, he sighted land on the other side of the Atlantic, likely an island in the modern-day Bahamas. Two weeks later he was at Cuba, and a month after that, he landed at Hispaniola, a large island that today hosts the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. (Page 27)

Columbus encountered the Taino Indians, part of a larger group sometimes known as the Arawaks. The Tainos, in turn, were in the midst of being driven off their islands by the ruthless, cannibalistic Caribs, who were working their way up the Leeward Islands chain from South America. (Page 27)

After losing his ﬂagship Santa Maria on a sandbar, Columbus had no choice but to leave some of his sailors behind. He christened the castaway settlement La Navidad and told them that he would return the following year. (Page 27)

Columbus was extremely disappointed to ﬁnd the Bahaman islanders going about naked and “poor in everything,” as he put it. He asked these people for directions to China, but they kept pointing him to the source of their own legends, a great kingdom of gold that lay to (Page 27)

the southeast. When Columbus later reached Cuba, he convinced himself (and tried to convince his men) that he had found the Asian mainland. (Page 28)

in Columbus’s mind was the hope that, given proper instruction, the Great Khan (the emperor) of China might prove willing to convert to Christianity. This would make him an invaluable ally against the Muslims whose successes after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 threatened to drive the Christians off the face of the Earth. (Page 28)

question of just how religious Columbus really was has exercised scholars throughout the modern era (Page 28)

In his journal Columbus advocated restraint when it came to introducing the Indians to Christianity, writing that “they were a people who could be more easily freed and converted to our holy faith by love than by force.” (Page 28)

Even in late medieval Spain, voluntary conversion was usually preferred. (Page 28)

Christianity has caused countless individuals to dedicate their lives to bettering the lot of Native groups in the New World, from Columbus’s day through the present. (Page 28)

Throughout his subsequent governorship of the Caribbean, despite his numerous incompetencies and misdeeds, Columbus was never a consistent advocate for forced conversion, any more than Isabella herself. (Page 30)

misleadingly informed them that the lands he had discovered were “inﬁnitely fertile” and contained ample amounts of gold and valuable Asian spices (Page 30)

hoped to rule over his island kingdom as a sort of count or duke, whose family would share in his prestige (Page 30)

described Cuba as an island larger than Great Britain, whose interior possessed “great mines of gold and other metals. (Page 30)

In order to exploit the connections he created with the New World, the entrepreneurial Columbus proposed the creation of a series of trading posts in the Caribbean. The idea was to trade with Natives for their most valuable products, using a string of permanent coastal forts as bases for trade. This was hardly a novel idea: Columbus simply embraced the trading-fort model that the Italians had been using in the Black Sea for centuries. This trading-fort model had recently been exported to the West Coast of Africa with great success. It would soon be adopted by the Portuguese in India, Malaysia, East Africa, and the Persian Gulf. (Page 30)

Given European experience throughout the Old World, in which Indigenous populations continued to thrive after contact with Europeans, neither Columbus nor anyone else could have foreseen the collapse in New World population levels that would result from European presence in the Caribbean. (Page 31)

Enticed by the potential of this New World, and the prospect of opening a direct trade route to China, they sent him out in 1493 with a much larger ﬂeet of seventeen ships, with the purpose of reinforcing the ﬂedgling colony at La Navidad. (Page 31)

Columbus arrived to ﬁnd La Navidad in ruins, its people having been murdered by the supposedly peaceful islanders. He therefore founded a second colony, which he called La Isabela. (Page 31)

Columbus was a terrible estate manager. (Page 31)

In the end, many colonists either ran off to live with the Indians or sailed back to Spain in disgust. (Page 31)

within a few years a full-scale rebellion was underway. (Page 31)

war with the Taino as early as 1494. (Page 32)

A few decades of Spanish maladministration and repression were sufﬁcient to drive most of the Taino Indians from the islands altogether (Page 32)

Given their proven ability to canoe from island to island, and also to spread news quickly over long distances, it seems likely that most of the supposed “victims” of the Spanish invasion simply ﬂed as Spanish repression got out of hand. (Page 32)

Many Taino women, meanwhile, settled down as wives of the them Spanish newcomers, knowing considerable protection. Enthusiastic miscegenation on both sides led to a rapid increase in the mixed-race “mestizo” population of the islands—not to mention a tolerance for mixed-race people that persists to this day. this would afford that (Page 32)

Desperate to prove that the New World could be proﬁtable for Spain, Columbus allowed his men to enslave some of the “rebellious” Indians on Hispaniola and sell them in the Seville slave market. He accordingly sent several hundred of these back to Spain, though nearly half of them died (along with their European captors) when their ship was lost in an Atlantic storm. (Page 32)

This single incident was to prove the sum total of Columbus’s slaving activities (Page 32)

practice of selling them in Spain was quickly squelched by order of the queen, who regarded the Taino as subjects and therefore ineligible for enslavement. When she learned (Page 32)

that about three hundred Tainos had been sold, she had the Indians tracked down, ransomed from their owners, and sent back to their homes in the New World. In fact, she was furious with Columbus, since she had made it clear that he was not to enslave the Natives; after this, she quickly sought ways to limit his power. (Page 33)

encomienda system, whereby Natives were subjected to forced labor by their Spanish landlords (Page 33)

labor-service concession, which worked reasonably enough back in Iberia, was roundly abused in the Caribbean. Many colonists interpreted it as a license to round up and forcibly relocate bands of Indians, leading to further strife, atrocities, mass ﬂight, and rapid social disintegration (Page 33)

they devised games No one should be under any illusion as to whether the Spanish sometimes treated the Indians with incredible cruelty. According to to determine whether various accounts, individual Indians should live or die; they tested the sharpness of their swords by lopping off Indians’ heads at random, and mutilated them in any number of ways. (Page 33)

Isabella’s inspector Francisco de Bobadilla arrived at the islands in 1500, he found open rebellion among Spanish and Indian factions against Columbus and his brother. (Page 33)

removed from power and sent them home in chains. immediately ordered Columbus and his brother (Page 34)

Columbus was never given another governorship. (Page 34)

Orinoco River in Venezuela (Page 34)

Jamaica (Page 34)

Columbus returned home in a state of extreme mental agitation. In these later years he was given to ﬁts of mystical prophecy and religious extremism that lasted until his death. (Page 34)

WAS COLUMBUS A MASS MURDERER? (Page 34)

According to popularly accepted ﬁgures, Columbus and the Spanish administrators of the islands are held responsible for the deaths of up to eight million Indians. (Page 34)

1542 of the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, which overhauled the encomienda system and led to a gradual stabilization of Colonist-Indian-mestizo relations. By the end of the sixteenth century, most forced labor in New Spain had been replaced by wage labor, with African slaves remaining a small minority of unpaid workers in many Latin American countries. (Page 34)

Las Casas’s main target was not Columbus himself, but the Spanish adventurers and ne’er-do-wells who came after him in search of an opportunity to get rich quick. (Page 35)

while it is true that thousands of people died as a result of Spanish maladministration and forced labor (perhaps up to twenty-ﬁve thousand over the course of ﬁfty years), the number of Indigenous people killed in military engagements or wanton violence probably numbered about two or three thousand. The total number who were enslaved and sent back to Spain likewise appears to have been in the hundreds. Columbus himself was responsible for a tiny fraction of those killed through direct violence and mistreatment; as governor, he proved as likely to kill a European “rebel” as an Indigenous one. The great majority of those who died—easily over 90 percent—were victims of disease rather than cruelty. (Page 35)

According to a report published in Indian Country Today, up to 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans have been found to have Taino Indian blood.17 This is a huge proportion, compared with only a couple of percent of Indian blood found in the US population at large. It suggests that Puerto Ricans have similar levels of Indigenous blood compared to other highly mixed peoples such as Mexicans, Guatemalans, and Bolivians; more will be said on this in the next chapter. (Page 36)

Flight, intermarriage, and disease therefore are likely to account for over 90 percent of the missing Indians, and all of this points to the fact that charges of mass murder have been greatly exaggerated. (Page 36)

The reason why the real numbers of killed and enslaved were so low is that the Spanish government viewed the inhabitants of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands as valuable subjects of the crown. (Page 36)

Columbus’s accomplishments as a navigator and explorer are irrefutable and justly catapult him into the ﬁrst rank of historical ﬁgures. For hundreds of years after Columbus, the mapmaking and geography he spurred acted as anchors for countless scientiﬁc advancements. It is no exaggeration to say that the European voyages of discovery remain foundational to all modern science and technology. Columbus was the ﬁrst to bring New World peoples back into contact with the major civilizations of the Old World, and he is rightly remembered as a brash, colorful architect of modern globalism. (Page 37)

Columbus was no saint. He was a self-aggrandizing entrepreneur and a bad administrator who allowed anarchy to break out where some other men might have kept order. (Page 38)

CHAPTER 2 DID EUROPEANS COMMIT GENOCIDE IN THE NEW WORLD? (Page 39)

Stannard’s 1992 book, American Holocaust, (Page 39)

Stannard set out to maximize the genocide element in the European colonization of the New World (Page 39)

1997 by Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide, whose lurid descriptions of millions of Indigenous people being hacked apart by European blades make Stannard’s claims look measured by comparison (Page 40)

Books like Stannard’s and Churchill’s were dismissed by mainstream historians as sensationalist drivel throughout the 1990s. Indeed, these books languished unread for decades, until the rise of social media began least cautious and most unscrupulous interpreters of Indigenous history to reward the (Page 40)

Stannard was roundly criticized at the time for exaggerating his population ﬁgures (Page 41)

Ward Churchill, for his part, is still considered a hero in Indigenous activist circles. Yet he is infamous for calling World Trade Center workers “little Eichmanns” who deserved to die for working in a “capitalist” building (Page 41)

Churchill made national news when he got ﬁred from UC Boulder for research fraud in 2007 (Page 41)

If Grosfoguel’s rhetoric makes little sense to you, that is probably a good sign. In a nutshell, he is arguing that all Western philosophical advancements since the Renaissance were somehow founded on four genocides (which he also calls “epistemicides” since these victims’ distinctive “ways of knowing” supposedly died with them). He thus concludes that the Cartesian Enlightenment was only possible because European males had murdered pretty much everyone else, including their own women. (Page 42)

Grosfoguel’s fevered musings ﬂy in the face of thousands of careful scholars who have traced the pedigree of European philosophy and science back to the Middle Ages and the ancient world, centuries before Grosfoguel’s “genocides.” Nor do these purported genocides (Page 42)

qualify as anything of the sort. It is true that thousands of European women were persecuted as witches in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Europe—but the total number of victims amounted to fewer than 0.02 percent of all women living in a given generation. A good number of male heretics were burned at the stake during the same centuries—would that count as an auto-genocide by the European patriarchy? (Page 43)

As for the mass extermination of Africans, the actual number of Africans enslaved by Europeans during the sixteenth century was only a few thousand, whereas the Islamic world had already enslaved millions over the better part of a millennium. African epistemic traditions were certainly not eradicated by Europeans at this time; compared with centuries of Islamic depredations and impositions, Europeans barely had any impact on African culture until the later nineteenth century. (Page 43)

treat polemicists Despite the lunacy behind such fact-lite theorizations, a new generation of historians now like Stannard, Churchill, and Grosfoguel as authoritative interpreters of truth. This has prompted increasing numbers of copycat books, often written by professional “genocide” scholars who readily equate the settlement of North America (death toll by massacre: 10 to 20 thousand people over 300 years; less than 1 percent of the total population), with what happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot (death toll by massacre: 1.5 to 3 million people over 4 years; up to 45 percent of the population). (Page 43)

The Dawn of Everything, a 2021 book by the late anthropologist (and self-described anarchist) David Graeber (Page 44)

THE REAL POPULATION OF THE NEW WORLD (Page 45)

For over a hundred years, historians across the political spectrum shied away from calling European adventurism in the New World “genocide.” The burden of proof therefore lies on those who would press that claim. But no new evidence has come to light that might plausibly shift the longstanding scholarly consensus against the use of this term, which has a very speciﬁc implication. (Page 45)

Stannard’s claim of one hundred million Indigenous dead rests on a series of population ﬁgures advanced by the maximalist “Berkeley School” of the 1970s (Page 45)

the relevant How credible is this claim of one hundred million deaths—or even one hundred and twenty-ﬁve million, as Ward Churchill asserts? A the majority of review of demographers and archaeologists estimate the population of the New World in 1491 at between fourteen and thirty-two million people. Even the most inﬂationary modern ﬁgures put the total at ﬁfty million people or less. literature shows that (Page 45)

Seven million dead sounds serious indeed. But are there any facts to back this up? The Tainos were a preliterate society. In the absence of written records, we must fall back on archaeology, geography, and what we know about the ability of farmers to produce food using various agricultural techniques. (Page 46)

The island of Hispaniola has a total area of about seventy-six thousand square kilometers. This is just over one half the size of England excluding Wales and Scotland, whose total area is about one hundred and thirty thousand square kilometers. It so happens that the population history of England is the best-studied for any country on Earth. Our best guess is that England in 1500 had only 2.1 million people, living on double the area of Hispaniola. (England’s maximum capacity before the seventeenth century was probably less than ﬁve million.) If Hispaniola really had seven million people in 1491, that would make its population roughly triple that of England at the time, and its population density about six times higher. the agricultural revolution of (Page 46)

We also know that England by 1500 had one of the most advanced agricultural regimes on Earth, with widespread use of heavy ploughs and draft animals. Only certain rice-growing areas of China and India could outpace it in the number of calories produced per acre. (Page 46)

Meanwhile, the natives of Hispaniola were using stone tools and practiced a light form of hoe and mound farming in clearings. They grew very limited crops, ate little and conserved energy to make up for their poor diet, and employed no animal power or mills. In fact, they had no domesticated animals besides dogs, and owing to their lack of metal axes their island was heavily forested; coupled with the mountainous terrain, this means that only a small percentage was arable. (Page 47)

This is why archaeologists and other specialists believe that the real population of Hispaniola in 1491 was about two hundred thousand people while even the “maximalists” in this subﬁeld argue for only three hundred thousand. (Page 47)

Stannard’s “genocide” on Hispaniola is thus objectively only oneﬁftieth as serious as he claimed, and that is before we start looking at other factors. (Page 47)

Unlike many modern writers, Johansson recognizes that many groups survived long centuries with little or no impact and other groups were assimilated in various ways rather than succumbing to sudden or violent ends by disease or warfare. (Page 48)

Johansson even recognizes the value in the reservation system, which gave Indigenous populations greater protection under US law than they previously enjoyed. As we will see for early colonial Mexico, the congregation of Indigenous groups into areas where they usually enjoyed protection under the law has resulted in a continuous upswing in Indigenous population levels, and paradoxically provided a basis for the recovery of Indigenous culture in modern times. (Page 48)

POPULATION AND GEOGRAPHY (Page 49)

One popular claim making the rounds on the internet is that the New World “had more people than Europe in 1491.” The main basis for this claim is the pseudoscientiﬁc book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by the science journalist Charles C. Mann, a proliﬁc anti-Western propagandist. Proponents of this claim tend to use the wildly exaggerated ﬁgure of one hundred million people in the New World, which we debunk over the course of this chapter.27 It is also intentionally misleading because it compares the New World not with the Old World as a whole but with Europe—a tiny corner of the Old World that was home to only about one-seventh of its population in 1491. (Page 49)

Why was the New World population so small in proportion to its size? One of the major constraining factors was geography. In the premodern world, people could only live where there were abundant food supplies. (Page 49)

Unfortunately for the New World peoples, the area that was ice-free year-round was relatively small. Fully one-third of the New World land is locked up in Canada, Alaska, and Greenland—which were far too cold to support large populations. Most of the continental United States freezes pretty hard in the winters, and the world was in the grip of a Little Ice Age when Columbus arrived. Most of northern Mexico is desert. Central America and equatorial South America are mostly thick, impenetrable jungle. At the southern tip of the New World, Argentina and Chile also get cold in the winters. This leaves only a narrow territory at the edge of the rain forests in central Mexico and analogous territory in parts of the Andes Mountains, where conditions were right for the multiplication of premodern peoples. (Page 50)

The Mississippian culture, one of the most advanced pre-Columbian civilizations in the continental US, evolved along the shores of this river system. (Page 50)

Accidents of geography therefore made it likely that the New World would never have as many people as the Old. Furthermore, close to 80 percent of the New World population was located in two very localized regions: central Mexico and the northern Andes. The rest of the New World was thinly populated indeed, with all of North America (Page 50)

north of the Rio Grande probably containing between one and three million people. Most of these were spread across the Mississippi, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions, with few settled in the west and north, apart from a few Paciﬁc coastal regions including California. Population densities in most of this area were usually less than one person per ten square kilometers. (Page 51)

By contrast, England had about ten people per square kilometer in 1500, which is a population density fully one hundred times higher than most of North America at the time. This is after the Black Death had been ravaging the European populations for a century and a half. The reason for this discrepancy in population densities is the difference in technology levels and capital. (Page 51)

English farmers could produce hundreds of times more calories per square kilometer (Page 51)

THE DEBATE OVER THE POPULATION OF MEXICO (Page 51)

Of all the New World peoples, only the Aztecs were in the process of developing a pictographic alphabet and writing system when the Europeans arrived (Page 51)

for The full range of demographic estimates the Mexican population, however, has been tabulated by Robert McCaa of the University of Minnesota.28 This shows that by far the most common estimate for the number of Mexicans before Cortes arrived is between ﬁve and ten million people.29 This would put the total population of the Americas at merely ten to twenty million people in 1491—a very reasonable assumption, considering the small amount of fertile, temperate land available, and the types of agriculture that were practiced. (Page 52)

The Indigenous population of Mexico in 1600 was probably about 1.5 to 3 million people. (Page 53)

If the population of Mexico in 1517 had only been 7.5 million, then, the Indigenous population probably plummeted by some 66 percent, but the total loss was more in the range of 5 million—only one-quarter as many people. (Page 53)

But long-term population decline in a region does not necessarily indicate anything of the sort. As historical demographers like S. Ryan Johansson point out, all you can say for certain about these estimates is that death rates exceeded birth rates. (Page 54)

Demographers studying the fall of Rome have found similar patterns of natural population decline due to cultural and political change, rather than violence. (Page 55)

In sixteenth-century Mexico, population decline was also due to a combination of social, political, and economic factors. These were summarized by Hanns Prem in 1992.3 (Page 55)

THE NEW WORLD POPULATION TODAY (Page 55)

Our ﬁnal demographic argument against the claim of genocide is the most straightforward: The Americas today are simply teeming with the descendants of the Indigenous people who were alive in 1491. (Page 55)

The pattern in the New World is similar to what happened during the European colonization of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In all those regions Europeans gained near-total political power for a time, but they continued to remain a small minority of the population. (Page 55)

To anyone who cares to see, it could be argued that Mexico—the epicenter of European-Indigenous encounters in the New World— represents one of the most successful experiments in interracial mixing in recent global history. (Page 56)

Of those Indigenous people who did “disappear” after 1491, most did not die a horrible death. Many were simply not born, because cultural upheaval tends to cause lower birth rates. Of those who actually died under adverse conditions introduced by Europeans, even Stannard recognizes that some 90 percent of Indigenous casualties of European intervention were due to neutral causes such (Page 57)

as disease, rather than war. (Page 58)

It nevertheless remains true that tens of thousands of Indigenous people died of mistreatment and forced labor at the hands of early Spanish adventurers, and thousands more died as a result of battles and massacres relating to warfare and cruelty through the centuries. Far too many people died in horrible conditions. (Page 58)

CHAPTER 3 WERE EUROPEANS RACIST? (Page 59)

uncompromising readings of American and European history as “stamped from the beginning” with an indelible stain of racism and white supremacy. Horne’s 2014 book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, paints the American Revolution not as a war to establish democracy but as a war to preserve slavery. (Page 60)

Prominent New Racialists such as Ibram X. Kendi follow Horne’s line, which places the origins of European racism at some point in the Renaissance between the Middle Ages and modernity. Kendi’s time line puts the origins of European racism a century earlier than Horne —during the ﬁfteenth century—which is convenient for him because it makes Columbus and the other early explorers into ready-made vectors for Jim Crow–style racism. (Page 61)

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is another radical scholar who has beneﬁtted from the runaway vision of Western civilization as racist. (Page 61)

Geraldine Heng and Cord J. Whitaker (Page 62)

Notice that neither of these scholars is a historian: they are literature majors whose formal training in history was presumably limited to discussions of how to read Geoffrey Chaucer through the lens of critical theory. (Page 62)

WHAT HISTORIANS USED TO THINK (Page 63)

The obvious reason for this is that modern conceptions of race only emerged in the later nineteenth century, and most historians knew that the further back you went in time, the less meaningful the modern terms “race” and “racism” actually become. (Page 64)

Like everyone else, I have been so bombarded with the notion that race is fundamental to human history that I was shocked to open a number of articles from the early 2000s to ﬁnd authors who openly wondered whether studying the history of “race” is a worthwhile pursuit for a serious scholar. One reason they cite is that society had made so much progress in race relations up to about 2010 that the issue was considered passé. It is worth recalling that in the 2000s, mainstream ideas about race in American society were centered on “colorblindness.” This was Martin Luther King’s mantra that in the future, racial prejudices would simply fade into the background. (Page 64)

eminent African American Princeton medievalist William Chester Jordan, responded with an article titled, “Why ‘Race’?” What is the purpose of giving the name race to a set of descriptors (language, law, customs, and lineage) that medieval writers attributed to contemporary social groups? What payoff is there in regarding medieval attitudes towards people of different “races” as “racist”?37 (Page 65)

Professor Jordan has many choice words for academic opportunists who seek to advance their careers by appearing to be “with it” and “cutting edge” rather than building a reputation through genuine scholarship. He dismisses authors who purport to ﬁnd racism in medieval and early modern sources as “presentists”—fake historians who make the amateur (Page 65)

mistake of viewing and judging the past through the lens of the present. This charge of presentism, by the way, is the same one that AHA President James Sweet made against the 1619 Project authors in the summer of 2022. (Page 66)

people who wanted to see the European past as indelibly racist had already won, concluding: “If [historians] say medieval people were racists, then ordinary readers and people they talk to will conclude that the pedigree leads right to apartheid or antebellum slavery, and some of them will even ﬁnd comfort in their own prejudices about… white Euro-Americans in general, saying ‘They’ve always been racists.’ (Page 66)

EUROPEAN RACISM AGAINST BLACKS AND INDIANS (Page 66)

The scholarly consensus still holds that Europeans were in fact not racist in the modern sense of believing some races to be distinct or essentially inferior, until the later nineteenth century. This makes good sense: before Charles Darwin published his work on evolution in 1859, it was not really possible to conceive of humans as having evolved in distinct genetic lines in the way we now take for granted. It was left to the Nazis to take this genetic-racist idea to its extreme, with their fantasy of dominating every other “inferior” race. (Page 66)

The history of racism in Europe is therefore surprisingly modern, and scientiﬁc racism, at least, was surprisingly short-lived. (Page 67)

Even in the case of “whiteness,” Europeans did not develop a clear sense of what this might mean until relatively late. Some authors claim that this occurred during the seventeenth century, while others maintain that this did not enter into common European discourse until the later eighteenth century. According to David Olusoga, writing in the Guardian in 2015, the roots of European racism against Africans can be “traced to those justifying slavery in the eighteenth century.”38 David R. Roediger, writing for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, repeats the consensus that Europeans did not really think of themselves as “white” until a few people started using the term in the seventeenth century, but the idea did not really catch on until the eighteenth century.39 (Page 67)

Much of what many people now categorize as early “racism” was relatively innocent, insofar as it was an inevitable consequence of an emerging scientiﬁc view of the world. As modern science began to take off in the eighteenth century, a big part of the process was observation and categorization. (Page 68)

As Europeans were developing this obsession with collecting and categorizing everything under the sun, they were also attempting to categorize different groups of humans. It was from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that they began to sort humanity into “black,” “red,” “yellow,” and “white” races, (Page 68)

The historian Alden T. Vaughan summed up the longstanding consensus on European prejudice (Page 68)

toward Indians in a 1982 American Historical Review article with the following words: Not until the middle of the eighteenth century did most Anglo-Americans view Indians as signiﬁcantly different in color from themselves, and not until the nineteenth century did red become the universally accepted color label for American Indians. To read later perceptions of Indian pigmentation into the ﬁrst centuries of racial contact is fallacious, because, in general, it distorts the nature of early ethnic relations and, in particular, it obscures the evolution of Anglo-American attitudes toward the Indians. Anglo-Americans believed that American Indians were approximately as light-skinned as Europeans—with all its implications—and thus would be assimilated into colonial society as soon as they succumbed to English social norms and protestant theology. (Page 69)

SKIN COLOR AS A FUNCTION OF LATITUDE (Page 69)

The science of the day also said next to nothing about different “races” of people based on skin color. A tradition dating back to ancient times held that humans were essentially the same all over the globe, but that the closer they got to the sun (i.e., to the equator), the darker their skin became. It was believed that if light-skinned people spent enough time in the south, they too would become dark. It should come as no surprise that late medieval people, who classiﬁed both bats and bumblebees as birds, were not attuned to any ﬁne points of racial difference. The contrast with their far more scientiﬁc nineteenth-century descendants is tremendous. (Page 70)

The prevalence of geography and latitude rather than “race” or innate characteristics led in early explorers’ Columbus to conclude that the Indians he found in the Caribbean were about the same color as the Canary Islanders but not as dark as the sub-Saharan Africans.41 Columbus reasoned that if he traveled farther south in the Americas, he would ﬁnd darker-skinned people. His contemporaries also believed that as they traveled farther North in North America, they would ﬁnd lighter-skinned Indians. is what thinking (Page 70)

Based on the strength of this anti-racist prejudice, Europeans well into the seventeenth century believed that North American Indians were essentially the same color as themselves. They believed that the skin color of the Old and New World people was differentiated by latitude rather than by continent. Dozens of sources relate to us their belief that North Americans were “born white” as babies but only became darker due to exposure to the sun and the thick ointments spread over them by their parents. Evidence for this attitude is widespread as we shall see. (Page 71)

Writing in 2017, the scholar Joan-Pau Rubiés summed up these Christian and proto-scientiﬁc strains in European thinking on race in the following way: In early modern Europe and up to the mid-eighteenth century, cultural diversity was usually explained with reference to climate, religion and national genealogy, without any serious equivalent to the racist ideologies that arose to prominence throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While there were some examples of religious persecutions, discriminatory colonial polices and philosophical attempts to classify the peoples of the world which involved some racialist principles… [this was done] within the framework of a monogenist understanding of the history of humankind. (Page 71)

The term “monogenist” refers to the Christian teaching that humans were descended from common ancestors and would one day be united again under the church. (Page 71)

RACISM AND SLAVERY (Page 71)

Apart from his indictment of Zurara, whose “racism” is questionable, Kendi’s narrative provides very little evidence of actual racism against Africans by the Portuguese. What it does do is provide a potted summary of how the Portuguese began to trade in African slaves from the 1440s, as though this was sufﬁcient proof of racism. But this perspective is oblivious to the fact that Europeans before Columbus’s day did not equate slavery with race—at all. (Page 72)

The further back you go into European history, the more the seemingly self-evident bond between slavery and racism dissolves into nothingness. Medieval Europeans thought of slavery in terms of religion not race. Christians made it legally permissible to enslave Muslims (though not Jews as a rule), and Muslims certainly made it permissible the Mediterranean, both Christians and Muslims came from the same ethnic stock. This equating of enslaveability with religion caused many practical problems for slave owners, because (as we have seen in Portugal) the religious conversion of a slave put enormous social pressure on owners to free their slaves, at least by the second generation. to enslave Christians. In many parts of (Page 72)

Even more embarrassingly for CRT scholars, there is abundant evidence that medieval and early modern Arabs were more racist toward Africans than Europeans were and from a much earlier date. William Chester Jordan provides the following examples: Consider the Muslim case. Avicenna (Ibn Sina) at the turn of the millennium wrote, “Those who are far removed from acquiring virtues are slaves by nature like the Turks and [N]egroes and in general people living in an unfavorable climate.” Or consider Ibn Khaldun, who would opine in the (Page 72)

fourteenth century, “The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and their proximity to the animal stage.” (Page 73)

The Arab world was importing slaves from Africa long before the Europeans, and we know that medieval Arab merchants charged far less for African than Caucasian slaves because they valued them less. Arabic commentators regularly pronounced Africans to be stupid, lazy, ugly, sexually predatory, and many other negative things besides. The Arabian Nights, one of the most widely copied manuscripts in the late medieval Islamic world, begins with a notorious description of a black slave as a “big slobbering Negro with rolling eyes…a truly hideous sight” who goes on to pleasure the debauched fair-skinned queen. As the critic Robert Irwin put it: The sexual threat posed by black men, as well as the disparagement of their looks and intelligence, features in a signiﬁcant number of the stories of the Arabian Nights, including ‘King ‘Umar ibn al-Nu’man and his family’, ‘Judar and his brothers’, ‘Gharib and Ajib’ and ‘Sayf al-Muluk’. These ugly passions can be found elsewhere in medieval Arabic popular literature. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange is a rival story collection to the Nights, though much less well known. It includes ‘The Story of Ashraf and Anjab and the Marvellous Things That Happened to Them’, a sustained ﬁctional exercise in racial abuse. The sadistic and villainous Anjab is described to Harun al-Rashid as follows: ‘This man is black as a negro…with red eyes, a nose like a clay pot and lips like kidneys’ and his mother is no better looking for she ‘was black as pitch with a snub nose, red eyes and an unpleasant smell.’45 (Page 73)

Ethiopian delegations were repeatedly entertained by the pope and other European ofﬁcials as honored guests and potential allies against Islam. The sources repeatedly praised Ethiopian learning and decorum, with little or no mention of “race.” (Page 74)

As a result, the Spanish authorities began to rule that certain groups of people were enslaveable based not on their religion or race but on their customs. This is why they pronounced that the cannibalistic Carib Indians were legally enslaveable, while the great bulk of the Indigenous population of the New World—including the Tainos and Mexica Indians—were not. By practicing cannibalism, the Caribs were held to have broken a law of humanity so sacrosanct that they forfeited their natural right to freedom because of it. Even so, the number of Caribs actually sold into slavery during the sixteenth century probably did not exceed the low thousands. (Page 75)

From Columbus’s time until the present day, Europeans usually stuck to this view that New World Indians should not be enslaved. This fundamental fact gives the lie to anyone who wishes to create a master narrative of European racism against all “People of Color.” True, some Indians were taken as slaves in the very early period, but by the end of the seventeenth century the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English had all agreed that while Africans were enslaveable, American Indians were not. (Page 75)

A number of factors inﬂuenced this attitude against enslavement of Indians. The most important creator of precedent was Queen Isabella herself. Her pronouncement against enslavement of the Indians was reiterated by her Spanish successors including Charles V and Philip II. The second factor was a practical one—it was discovered that, perhaps because of their susceptibility to Old World diseases, Native Americans tended to waste away and die at a much higher rate than Africans when subjected to conﬁnement and forced labor. (Page 75)

American Indians traditionally held slaves from rival tribes; thus, they thought nothing of purchasing and keeping Africans as slaves. When the Chickasaw Indians were forcibly driven toward Oklahoma, their (Page 75)

Indian black slaves numbered more population. The Cherokee held African slaves equal to 10 percent of their total population. than 20 percent of the (Page 76)

EUROPEAN PRAISE FOR AMERINDIANS (Page 76)

Much later in the colonial period, English travelers throughout the colonies frequently remarked on the beauty of Native women, describing them as “sylvan nymphs,” “enticing dryads,” and other expressions of extreme beauty. They also appreciated the fact that many young Indian women proved willing to cavort with Englishmen. (Page 77)

CULTURE VS. RACE (Page 78)

William Byrd’s comments make clear a ﬁnal distinction that almost every modern commentator on race fails to notice, namely that someone can pass negative judgment on a culture without judging it in racial terms. (Page 78)

Byrd was perfectly correct in stating that English colonists in the eighteenth century inherited a more advanced culture than the Virginia Indians. (Page 79)

A BALANCED ASSESSMENT (Page 79)

Serious historians have always been aware that Europeans did not link slavery with race until centuries after they discovered the New Islamic society, early European World. Unlike contemporary explorers did not consistently associate Africans, Native Americans, or dark skin with negative traits. Colorism was apparently less prevalent in sixteenth-century Europe than in the Islamic world, or South Asia, or East Asia, where its long-term presence antedates European arrival and is incontestable. If Europeans believed that Native Americans were “born white,” or “white by nature,” this had (Page 79)

less to do with their sense of superiority than with their scientiﬁc understanding that color was a product of latitude. (Page 80)

over the centuries hundreds of commentators, preachers, and educators would reiterate the point that the only thing that made Amerindians different from Europeans was their cultural disadvantages. Oft-repeated statements to the effect that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” generally stem from much later in history, often from brief, speciﬁc periods arising in the context of warfare and revenge. (Page 80)

In light of this overwhelming consensus, we can see that it is actually modern race baiters like Dunbar-Ortiz, Kendi, Horne, and Heng who are cherry-picking evidence. (Page 80)

In their efforts to ﬁnd the holy grail of systemic racism, they willingly conﬂate cultural chauvinism with racism, while deliberately sowing division and anger by portraying Europeans as racist monsters out of all proportion to their genuine sins. (Page 80)

CHAPTER 4 WERE THE CONQUISTADORS BLOODTHIRSTY ZEALOTS? (Page 81)

T he ﬁrst Spanish explorers set foot in the future United States more than ﬁve hundred years ago and explored surprisingly large areas in a short amount of time. Florida was ﬁrst explored by Juan Ponce de Leon in the 1510s. The Lower Mississippi was explored by Hernando de Soto in the 1530s and ’40s. And the southwest was originally explored at about the same time by men such as Francisco de Coronado and Juan de Oñate. Finding no gold, cash crops, or large cities, they left most of this area untouched for several centuries afterwards. (Page 81)

On Twitter, Facebook, and other online platforms, descriptions of the most gruesome events from the entire conquest period—many of them popularized by Stannard’s American Holocaust—get posted and go viral. (Page 82)

Spanish colonizers are portrayed in the national media as agents of “violence, theft, the erasing of Indigenous culture and forcible religious conversion.” (Page 82)

It is a fundamental truth of history that most of the major battles of conquest in Mexico and Peru were fought and won not by the Spanish themselves but by Native troops who voluntarily allied with the Spanish against their longstanding tribal enemies. Considering how dependent the Spanish were on Indigenous people for supplies, information, and simple goodwill, their policy of creating such local alliances makes perfect sense. (Page 83)

The odds are that most readers will never have heard of the Russian atrocities committed against Indigenous Aleuts in Alaska. Similar Russian excesses against Indigenous people in Siberia lasted for many centuries and were often as horriﬁc and widespread as anything perpetrated by the Spanish in the New World. And yet—partly because the Left spent much of the twentieth century sympathizing with the USSR—the English-speaking world knows nothing about this egregious chapter in the history of anti-Indigenous violence. (Page 83)

It is the job of an objective historian not merely to lament and lay blame for tragedies but to contextualize them and to compare them with similar events for the purpose of coming to a true understanding of their cause and context, the better to avoid their repetition. (Page 84)

THE REAL CORTES (Page 84)

Hernan Cortes retains a reputation as a wily, bloodthirsty soldier of fortune who orchestrated the deaths of millions of Indigenous people and viewed the rest as so many potential slaves. (Page 84)

complex man. Highly literate and educated in the law, he was ﬁercely determined and fearless on the battleﬁeld (Page 84)

After ﬁrst visiting the Yucatan and then landing in Veracruz with an initial force of a few hundred men, Cortes ordered them to burn their remaining boats. His stated intention was to conquer the Aztec Empire, and he made it clear to his men that there would be no room for failure. (Page 84)

In October, however, the Tlaxcalans manipulated the Spanish into a battle with their longtime enemies, the Cholulans. After a ruse, the Tlaxcalans (by some accounts, they were helped by the Spanish) massacred the Cholulans by the tens of thousands. (A death toll which by the way dwarfs the total amount of Natives killed in massacres by whites during the entire history of the United States and Canada, but which appears perfectly acceptable to the likes of David Stannard and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.) (Page 85)

When Montezuma died of his wounds, the Aztec people ﬁnally rose in open revolt against the Spaniards. Cortes and his men were forced to ﬂee back to their allies at Tlaxcala under cover of darkness, though many of them were killed during a night they later called the “Night of Sorrows.” (Page 85)

Cortes was governor of New Spain from this time until 1524; later he led an expedition to Honduras with a number of Native allies and in subsequent years explored as far north as the Baja peninsula. (Page 86)

Considering that the Spaniards’ Indigenous allies often outnumbered them by a ratio of twenty to one, it stands to reason that most of the Aztecs who died in the campaigns were likely killed by Indigenous rather than European hands. (Page 86)

This is why recent biographies tend to portray Cortes as one of the luckiest men. At several points on his most famous world’s expedition, he came within a hair’s breadth of being overwhelmed and killed. Of course, we all know that you make your own luck, at least to some degree. Cortes understood this as well, which is why he determined to make and keep as many Indigenous allies as possible, a strategy he adhered to throughout his campaigns. Incidentally, this shows how the Indigenous people of Mexico could have—at any point—turned on Cortes and massacred him and his men. But many of them saw Cortes as a useful political opportunity, of which they were more than happy to take advantage. (Page 87)

Not long after Cortes left Cozumel, a local chief offered Cortes twenty female slaves as part of a gift exchange. Cortes’s acceptance of slave girls should not be read in an anti-European light. It was part of the local culture that chiefs, upon meeting, might exchange presents including slave girls. The persistent rumor repeated by the likes of Elena Ortiz that most Indigenous cultures were “matrilineal” therefore “feminist” and more empowering for women than European society is truly ridiculous, especially in the context of central Mexico circa 1520. Indigenous society, even more than in Europe, tended to treat women as prizes and trade goods, leaving individual women to get by as best they could. The twenty women offered to Cortes had already been (sex) slaves to Indigenous masters; many of them had been captured and purchased by Indigenous trafﬁckers from across central and southern Mexico, whence they had been brought to regional slave markets. (Page 88)

One of these slave women, Malintzin, rechristened Marina by the Spanish, turned out to be ﬂuent in Nahuatl, the lingua franca of the greater Aztec region (Page 88)

treat her as his surrogate. (Page 89)

Marina was instrumental in helping Cortes negotiate with Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, and Cortes reportedly said that he could never have accomplished the conquest of the Aztec kingdom without her. (Page 89)

So while the Spanish may have facilitated the massacre, it is clear that it would not have happened had the Tlaxcalans not desired to make this detour in order to avenge themselves against their hated enemies. (Page 90)

For their aid in the subsequent conquest of Mexico, Cortes and the Spanish government later allocated them a special status. They were literally ennobled—the entire tribe was granted the Spanish title of hidalgo. This fact made them socially superior to most of the Europeans they encountered. Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed that the quality of “nobility” made someone almost biologically superior to other people; they also believed that nobility could be passed on through one’s blood via procreation. If the early Spanish were racist in any signiﬁcant way, they believed that nobles were a sort of superior race within their own (Page 90)

society. And yet, they proved willing to confer this status en masse to their Indian allies. None of this ﬁts very easily with postcolonialist stereotypes about Europeans, colonization, racism, and the rest. (Page 91)

ETHNIC HETEROGENEITY IN MEXICO (Page 92)

From the earliest years of Spanish Mexico, Indigenous and mestizo people were given places of honor in the Mexican hierarchy. (Page 92)

All this intermarriage meant that Mexico became the mixed-race society that it is today with surprising rapidity, just as occurred in the Caribbean. In such a plural society, we should not be surprised to ﬁnd complex and accommodating racial attitudes. (Page 92)

By most measures, colonial Mexico was a more tolerant and heterogeneous society than any colony set up by the English. (Page 93)

CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURAL GENOCIDE (Page 93)

Aztec religion was polytheistic, which absorbed many concepts from earlier Mesoamerican cultures, particularly the Maya. Though they believed in an ultimate god, they also worshipped many lesser deities who represented various concepts, objects, and places. One of the central concepts of their religion was that human blood was needed in order to keep the world from falling apart; the gods had given blood at the time of the world’s creation, and humans were therefore obliged to give this blood back or risk the dissolution of the world. (Page 94)

When a people were conquered by a neighboring tribe, those who were not sacriﬁced would be forced to adopt the religion of the conquerors, though oftentimes important local deities would be incorporated into the calendars of the conquerors themselves. (Page 94)

The Spanish clergy in the New World acted quickly to destroy certain signs of the ancient religious practices that they deemed most egregious, such as human sacriﬁce and the drinking of human blood. (Page 95)

The gold-standard Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas has this to say about the process: force religion had been a major for Pre-Hispanic expressing and reinforcing community unity, and Christianity proved a vehicle to continue this. Each town had a Christian patron saint, as did each residential subdivision (tlaxilacalli). The saint’s name became part of the name of the town or ward: pre-Hispanic Culhuacan, for instance, became San Juan Evangelista Culhuacan. The saint’s day of the town or ward was one of celebration, reinforcing community solidarity as much as religious belief. In general, the sites of the pre-Hispanic cults (Page 96)

became the location of the Christian churches and chapels, important for the community. The pre-Hispanic sacred site at Tepeyac became the focus of ﬁrst a local, then a regional, and ﬁnally a national pilgrimage destination for the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. In most indigenous towns, the churches built on sacred sites continued to be a focus of native identity through religious expression. The size of a church and the elaborateness of its decorations and furnishings were important to the native community, visible signs of unity and prominence.63 (Page 97)

CHAPTER 5 IS EUROPE GUILTY OF “SETTLER COLONIALISM”? (Page 98)

The idea of settler colonialism was popularized by the rogue Australian academic Patrick Wolfe, whose book Settler Colonialism was published in 1999 (Page 99)

Not a Nation of Immigrants, Roxanne DunbarOrtiz summarizes this alleged combination of racism, capitalism, and (Page 99)

genocide by explaining that “white nationalism was inscribed in the founding of the United States as a European settler-colonial expansionist entity.” (Page 100)

postcolonial studies, which was itself spurred by the publication of Palestinian scholar Edward Said’s landmark book Orientalism in 1978. (Page 100)

Said’s book was one of the ﬁrst in-depth critiques of Western narratives that until that time viewed the West as normative and primary, and the East as exotic and secondary. Edward Said had a point: until then, most Westerners did write as though Europe was the yardstick against which every historical value judgment should be made. (Page 100)

As Dunbar-Ortiz put it in her 2014 Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: “The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources.” The result of this racially motivated capitalist pressure was the phenomenon now known as “settler colonialism. (Page 101)

most of the concepts associated with settler colonialism collapse into a rubble of illogic once one identiﬁes and removes the Marxist theory that props them up. (Page 102)

Ironically, a vein of “Western exceptionalism” lies at the core of much settler colonialist theory. Western exceptionalism is the conscious or unconscious idea that from all other Western civilization civilizations—an idea that Edward Said was at pains to refute. fundamentally “different” is (Page 102)

We have seen how many anglophone academics treat the situation in the United States—home to less than 10 percent of the New World population in 1491—as though it was emblematic of the entire New World. This is a form of “imperialist thinking” if ever there was one. As in Mexico and Peru, so it was in almost all of Africa, Asia, and the Paciﬁc Islands: wherever to European there were expansion, there remain large Indigenous populations today. Indigenous populations prior large (Page 103)

The only reason parts of the New World, such as the present-day US and Canada and also Australia and New Zealand, are majority non-Indigenous is because the Indigenous population of these lands was so truly sparse—1 percent or less as dense as most of Europe at the time. And that the land was, as contemporary sources frequently describe it, virtually empty and more or less there for the taking. Few of us realize that before European contact, for example, all of Australia was home to about three hundred thousand Aboriginal people. (Page 103)

indisputable that the majority of those who were forced from their homes during those centuries were victims of Indigenous raids and attacks, rather than European pressure. (Page 104)

For the ﬁrst two and a half centuries after Columbus, Europeans remained conﬁned to limited enclaves in the New World. Large parts of Mexico and Latin America remained in the hands of Indigenous people throughout the colonial period and beyond. As recently chronicled by Pekka Hämäläinen, most of the actual “dispossession” of Indigenous people in North America occurred quite rapidly, during the nineteenth century, due to a combination of natural population increase and European immigration.65 This land grab happened only after the Indigenous population was outnumbered by a factor approaching one hundred to one. (Page 104)

The few cases of enforced migration that academics point to, such as the Trail of Tears, have long been infamous and do not carry much demographic weight. The Trail of Tears came very late in the European colonialist game, and as we will see it met with enormous resistance from Americans themselves both at the time and afterwards. (Page 105)

For most of the colonial era, European countries were too broke, distracted, and disorganized to affect large populations in such a grandiose way. (Page 105)

is the fact there Finally, that humanitarian and anti-racist sentiments were common in Europe throughout the early modern period. This was the era of the Enlightenment, which saw Europe quite literally invent the modern discourse on human rights. When McGill professor of religious studies Arvind Sharma posed the question Are Human Rights Western? in his 2006 book, his conclusion was “yes.” The global discourse of human rights as we know it today is fundamentally European in its pedigree. Thus, for every ten freebooters bullying their way into a fortune, there was always a Las Casas, a Queen Isabella, a William Wilberforce, or simply a humble local pastor ready to call such rufﬁans out for their cruelty. We simply do not ﬁnd such a plethora of humanitarian sentiment in most traditional cultures, where individual human rights are normally subsumed under the rights of powerful men, institutions, and family honor. (Page 106)

From the time of Cortes through that of Thomas Jefferson and beyond, Europeans were continually searching their souls over the issue of slavery and Indigenous rights. Thousands of pages of letters, pamphlets, and other writings attest to this fact. (Page 106)

DID “CAPITALISM” DISPOSSESS THE INDIANS? (Page 106)

Today we realize that there have never been major shifts in the fundamentals of economics, at any stage of history. Every economy, whether based on cowrie shells or crypto, has been subject to the same basic laws of supply, demand, and market forces. That’s why we can say that there is no such thing as capitalism per se—because there is no such thing as not-capitalism either. All economies are fundamentally the same; the only difference is how you organize them. (Page 107)

Before the later nineteenth century with its factories, railroads, telegraphs, joint-stock companies, and stock markets, it’s difﬁcult to ﬁnd serious evidence of what we would call “capitalism” anywhere in the New World. By this time, most of the damage that was going to be done to Indigenous populations in the US and Canada was a fait accompli. So blaming the decline of Indian populations on capitalism seems misguided at best. (Page 107)

It is true that from the seventeenth century, the Dutch and the British organized their Caribbean slave plantations in such a way that investors could buy shares in them, but this in itself is barely capitalistic. Plantation systems were simply a variety of the “great estate” system that had been in use in the Old World for thousands of years. In Egypt, in Sumer, in Rome, and in medieval Europe, great estates were set up by elites as a way of maximizing their proﬁts from the agricultural productivity of a given region. To pretend that there (Page 107)

was something fundamentally different in New World plantations is to confuse kind with degree. (Page 108)

Greer’s inescapable conclusion is that there was no world system of capitalism, or even of individual proﬁt motives, that drove settler dispossession of Indian land in North America. Nothing akin to a “capitalist system” made North American land markets nastier—let alone more racist—than they otherwise would have been, and any assertion to the contrary is based on theory and emotion rather than fact. (Page 108)

DID COLONIALISM AND SLAVERY MAKE EUROPE RICH? (Page 108)

This tale has all the ingredients to stoke a rage born of injustice. It paints a picture where in the year 1500, BIPOCs across the globe were on an economic par with Europe, poised to create a harmonious (Page 109)

and prosperous future for themselves. But European rapaciousness, driven by the alienating logic of capitalism and a thirst for conquest, not only stole this bright future but also rendered BIPOCs desperate and subservient, while white people used colored capital to create a glittering civilization for themselves. In this view, Europeans have been little more than schoolyard bullies for the better part of a millennium (Page 110)

Western Europe was already rich—the richest region in the world—before the New World was discovered and before Europeans had more than the foggiest notion of what a nonwhite person was. (Page 110)

researchers repeatedly show that transatlantic slavery contributed only a modest sum to total European GDP. At the very height of the slave trade, between 1750 and 1800, this amounted to somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 10 percent. Before and after that period, the numbers become even more inconvenient for anyone trying to make this argument. (Page 110)

Between the years 1000 and 1500—long before Europeans could be accused of exploiting more than a tiny handful of nonwhite people —a remarkable thing happened. The per person GDP of Western Europe steadily grew to nearly double the global average, while the GDP of every other region stagnated or grew by a modest amount. Maddison’s dataset shows European per capita GDP in 1500 at nearly $800, while Mexico, Peru, and Africa still stood where they were ﬁve hundred years earlier—at about $400. Nor did the per capita GDP of Mexico, Peru, or Africa plummet after the arrival of the Europeans—it simply remained on the same slow-growth trajectory that it had been on for centuries. So much for the notion that European arrival constituted an economic disaster for the majority of Indigenous inhabitants. (Page 111)

This suggests that the European economy was already set on its growth trajectory prior to its colonial adventure and that the discovery of New World colonies—while very helpful for some regions at certain times—did not signiﬁcantly alter the growth trajectory of the West European economy as a whole. (Page 111)

The pretense that the Northern economy was shackled to slavery in a meaningful way is belied by the Civil War itself, which saw the North switch to other sources of cotton and manufacturing. The North experienced an enormous economic boom in the aftermath of the war, while the economy of the South collapsed. According to recent research presented in the American Economic Review, slave-generated capital did not as a rule survive the Civil War.69 (Page 112)

American real estate taken from the Indians did not begin to turn a proﬁt until the later nineteenth century, and the great majority of American wealth from that period came from the marshaling of natural resources unknown to Indigenous people such as oil, coal, and steel. (Page 112)

The real dynamos of modern American wealth were factories, which require very little land. These became increasingly dominant in American wealth creation during and after the Civil War. Most of them were located in the Northeast, and most workers were European immigrants. The factory system, in turn, depended on the long evolution of trade, manufacture, and ﬁnancial institutions in Europe, which had been ongoing since the Middle Ages, long before the Age of Exploration began. (Page 113)

Part I of this book, we debunked a number of popular myths about early European colonization of the New World. We can summarize our ﬁndings as follows: Christopher Columbus was not a mass murderer, and he did not start the African slave trade. The Spanish did not commit genocide in the New World. Claims that Europeans killed one hundred million Indigenous people in the New World are gross exaggerations with no basis in reality. The real population of the New World in 1491 was closer to twenty-ﬁve million people, and Hispaniola likely had two hundred and ﬁfty thousand people rather than three or eight million as is usually claimed. Sensationalists want us to believe that over 90 percent of these people died by ﬁre and sword at the hands of bloodthirsty racist Europeans, but much of the population decline was a simple failure of Indigenous societies to maintain replacement birthrates. The remainder was largely caused by the natural spread of disease. The majority of the people who died during the conquests of the Aztec and Incan Empires were killed by Indigenous people, not Spaniards. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire saved at least thirty thousand people per year by ending the barbaric practice of mass enslavement, human sacriﬁce, and the cannibalism associated with it. (Page 113)

Credible experts have calculated that the total number of North American Indians who were massacred during the entire ﬁvehundred-year history of European colonization is less than ten thousand individuals, maximally twenty thousand if one accepts Benjamin Madley’s ﬁgures for California after 1848 (as we will discuss in a later chapter). This is out of a population initially numbered at more than one million. Very likely, more Europeans were massacred by Indians during the settlement period than the other way around. As of this writing, Wikipedia agrees.70 Certainly far more than ten thousand Indians were massacred by other Indians in North America during this same time period, though next to no attention is paid to this fact by modern historians. (Page 114)

The theory of settler is a mishmash of pseudo-Marxist misreadings of colonialism (Page 114)

economic history, which relies on outdated nineteenth-century concepts such as “primitive accumulation.” Reality can seldom be pigeonholed into a system, and many of the academics who vocally promote such faddism are not historians or economists but literature professors and others with little grasp of how human societies evolve in their baroque glory. (Page 115)

For hundreds of years after the Europeans arrived in America, they harbored no plan to displace the majority of Indigenous people. In most places, the goal was to maintain coastal trading forts rather than to exclude or evict Indians from vast areas. The theory of settler colonialism is given the lie by the simple fact that in 95 percent of the places where Europeans landed around the globe, they never displaced Indigenous populations. Rather than obey some inexorable capitalist logic, Europeans merely took advantage of places where there were few or no Indigenous people able to make a viable land claim. This included only the most thinly populated places such as Australia (which had about one hundred thousand Indigenous people before Europeans arrived, and nearly eight hundred thousand today), and North America (which likewise had a negligible population density in most of its territory). (Page 115)

In Mexico, which was then and now by Indigenous and mixed-race people, the Indians were granted extensive tracts to govern where it was illegal for non-Indians to purchase land. Indian villages were accorded the same political institutions as enjoyed by Spaniards. These arrangements lasted for several centuries until independence. Farther north, almost 90 percent of North America remained in Indigenous hands for the ﬁrst three hundred years of European presence in the New World. thickly populated (Page 115)

II THE NATIVE PEOPLES (Page 116)

CHAPTER 6 WERE NEW WORLD CIVILIZATIONS EQUAL OR SUPERIOR TO EUROPE? (Page 117)

C harles C. Mann’s 1491: The Americas Before Columbus, published in 2005, is arguably the most inﬂuential book ever published on Mesoamerican civilization. (Page 117)

Mann goes to great lengths to “prove” that Amerindian peoples had a large impact on their environments, and he asserts that Amerindians were just as advanced as Europeans not only in metallurgy but also in philosophy and mathematics. (Page 117)

But the real problem is that Mann slyly disguises his book as history when its primary aim is polemical. He therefore represents one of the worst aspects of our new culture of misinformation, one that deliberately distorts history to generate attention (and book sales) while bolstering a political narrative. (Page 118)

THE AZTEC TECHNOLOGY LEVEL: CIRCA 3000 BC (Page 119)

most advanced New World societies were roughly 4,500 (Page 119)

years behind the Old World civilizations of China, Islam, India, and Europe when Columbus stumbled into the Caribbean. (Page 120)

The fact that there was a gap of nearly ﬁve thousand years between the technological levels of the Old World and the New will come as a revelation to many people and upset many more, but it is based on a wealth of information and scholarly consensus, meaning that it is more or less indisputable. (Page 120)

If the Aztecs had not been in the grip of the biggest cult of human sacriﬁce the world has ever seen at the time the Spanish landed, they would be remembered much more fondly by academics and popular culture alike. Despite this gruesome ﬂaw, the Aztec civilization was far more complex and sophisticated than most people recognize. Mesoamerican civilization had been capable of constructing great cities for over a thousand years before Cortes arrived, and the city-state was long established as a ﬁxture in the political, economic, and cultural landscape. Dozens of cities around Mesoamerica contained tens of thousands of people; buildings in their centers were elaborately constructed of stone and decorated with sculpture. (Page 120)

Cortes and other conquistadors sent back several accounts of the Mesoamerican cities that described them as being “greater than” this or that European city, and superﬁcially they were correct. Some Mesoamerican cities had more people than most European cities of the time, and some of them boasted impressive buildings, temples, (Page 121)

in size. squares, and markets that seemed equal or greater Ornaments and clothing could be elaborate and of high artistic quality. (Page 122)

Had he stumbled upon the Sumerian city of Ur as it was in circa 3000 BC in the middle of a Mesoamerican jungle, Cortes would have found similar wonders to report. (Page 122)

TECHNOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL COMPARISONS (Page 122)

The real explanation is fascinating, if not quite so exotic. All these societies built pyramids ﬁrst, because pyramids are the simplest monumental buildings that can be constructed out of stone. They are incredibly stable, because they have no vertical surfaces that might bow and collapse. They are easy to build, because they provide natural ramps, up which material can be carried to the highest levels. They require no columns, and they can be ﬁlled up with rubble and earth. Their lack of all but a tiny interior space means that they require no sophisticated understanding of support structures and material strength. At the same time, they are visually very impressive, because of their height and regular geometry. (Page 122)

Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians and improved upon their techniques. They perfected the column, the lintel, and the tympanum, meaning they could create wider, airier, and column-free interior spaces by about 500 BC. (Page 123)

A few centuries after this, the Romans hit upon the idea of stacking rows of columns on top of each other. This enabled them to build much taller structures than the Greeks had been able to do, leading to the construction of works such as the Colosseum in Rome and great aqueducts such as the Pont du Gard in southern France. (Page 123)

The same goes with technical innovations such as the wheel and astronomy. The Mayan and Aztec astronomical innovations, including an elaborate calendar and a system for predicting eclipses, were certainly impressive—but they were still on a par with those of the early Sumerians. To this day, we continue to use a “base 60” system for keeping time, and for compass directions. Astronomers continue to divide the sky into 360 degrees of longitude (right ascension), and 180 degrees of celestial latitude (declination). We inherited this base 60 system from the ancient Babylonians, who themselves inherited it from earlier Mesopotamian peoples such as the Sumerians. (Page 124)

Babylonians were so advanced in astronomy, and their systems for measuring the sky, the earth, and time were so practical, that even in the modern world of supercomputers and space-based telescopes we continue to use their innovations as the basis of our own computations. (Page 124)

Europeans arriving with Columbus and Cortes were the beneﬁciaries of thousands of years of advancements made inherited numerous ancient across the Old World. Europeans advances in iron smelting, Roman law, the Greek invention of coined money, the medieval invention of the codex (book), the Arab invention of the bill of exchange, the Chinese invention of gunpowder, the European development of cannon, millennia of experience with (Page 124)

building oceangoing vessels, lenses for eyeglasses, and innumerable other advances. (Page 125)

WHY DID THE NEW WORLD LAG BEHIND? (Page 125)

Jared Diamond’s 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel has been accused of geographical determinism, and his methodology does downplay too much the role of human culture and institutions. Nonetheless, Diamond’s logic does come into play in the grand scheme of human civilization, because geography sets basic parameters such as resource bases and how many people a given area can support at a given technological level. (Page 125)

The growth of civilization requires fertile, largely frost-free areas that are not overgrown by thick jungle; the existence of large rivers to boost agricultural fertility, facilitate trade, and speed communication also helps immeasurably. This is why the New World had only one-tenth of the world’s total population in 1491. In the relatively small areas of central Mexico and the Andes that ticked off many of these boxes, the lack of suitable rivers severely hampered the growth of civilization. Farther north, the Mississippi River system was subject to harsher climatic conditions and lower fertility levels, meaning that its population densities remained much (Page 125)

lower, and its advance toward civilization consequently lagged behind Mesoamerica and the Andes. (Page 126)

The advance of civilization is dependent on the presence of large population nuclei. Large numbers of people living in close quarters are forced to organize their societies, and innovations such as writing and specialized craftsmanship tend to follow. Such population nuclei are fostered by the adoption of intensive forms of agriculture, which forces people to stay put in the same place, year after year. Gradually, people learn to build more permanent settlements. Often there are false starts, where quasi-permanent settlements are abandoned after a few centuries. Only after millennia of settlement do people become so habituated to life in cities that they come to regard their settlements as truly permanent. Early descriptions of Ur describe the walls and temples with a sort of braggadocio that suggests an expectation of permanence. The Mississippian culture had not yet gotten to this point, while the Mesoamericans, and to some extent the Incas, were further along this scale. (Page 126)

the Old World made contact and introduced technological and cultural them thousands of years of to (Page 126)

advancements, all in the space of a few generations. The results were bound to be completely transformative on New World ways of life. This is a tragedy in many regards, but we must not lose sight of the fact that it was a blessing in many others—including for the hundreds of millions of descendants of Indigenous people across the Americas who are alive and well in the modern world. (Page 127)

So, while it is fair to lament the passing of so many New World customs, it is important to remember that the lifestyle the Europeans had to offer was in most ways far superior to the late Stone Age society of 1491. While the New World would probably have gone on to (Page 128)

develop Roman-era levels of technology if left undisturbed by Europeans, this might well have taken them until about AD 4500. Looking at the big picture, most Latin Americans alive today would probably prefer a world in which Columbus discovered America. (Page 129)

CHAPTER 7 WERE NATIVE AMERICANS NATURALLY PEACEFUL AND BENEVOLENT? (Page 130)

Beginning in the 1970s, however, the academic Left began to appropriate the popular image of the Indian for their own ends. Rejecting the earlier “brave warrior” stereotype, they replaced it with a new ﬂower-child image of Native Americans as wise ecologists, a (Page 130)

people close to the Earth who understood better than the white man how to maintain a balance between nature and human societies. We will address this image of the nature-loving “ecological Indian” in a subsequent chapter. (Page 131)

Meanwhile, the peace movement sought to downplay the element of violence in Native American culture. They portrayed Indians as naturally disposed toward peace, seeking agreement and consensus, and only resorting to war as a last option. Even in wartime, their culture was supposedly moderated by the same wise tendency toward balance and restraint that they showed toward nature. (Page 131)

This enables the anti-colonialists to pretend that any “bad” or violent habits encountered by Europeans were merely the result of Europe’s own corrupting inﬂuence. (Page 132)

A SOCIETY BUILT FOR WAR (Page 132)

There is one small problem with this image of peace-loving Native American societies: it is completely untrue. Before the Spanish imposed peace on Amerindian tribes from California to Tierra del Fuego, the unrelenting reality of their lives was a Hobbesian war of all against all. (Page 132)

Outside of a tiny area of city-states in Mesoamerica and the Andes, Native American societies were uniformly tribal chiefdoms. Wherever in the world such city-states and chiefdoms have arisen, warfare has been a continuous part of life. As a rule, the majority of males in chiefdoms are trained in the art of war; in city-state areas, elite males train in war while the rest of the males participate in agriculture or crafts that support the warrior elite. (Page 132)

There are very few general truths in the history of global civilization, but one of the most reliable is that in areas where rulers monopolize violence on a small scale, warfare, raiding, and slavery will be endemic. Steven Pinker calls this “the inescapable logic of anarchy.” (Page 132)

General peace is only possible when strong rulers monopolize violence on a large scale; this is the only thing that has historically protected people from a nearcontinuous threat of localized raiding. (Page 132)

Aztec elites also regularly conducted “Flower Wars” for the purpose of gaining sacriﬁcial victims for their religious rites; credible sources suggest that at Tenochtitlan alone, tens of thousands of people were sacriﬁced every year. (Page 133)

The picture of Andean civilization farther south is also one of nearly continuous warfare stretching as far back as the archaeological record allows us to see. The Moche civilization arose around the same time as Teotihuacan and the Mayan city-states; the Moche were imperialists who spread their inﬂuence for hundreds of miles via a policy of continuous warfare. Like the Aztecs and Maya, the Moche culturally fetishized success in warfare; they were also in the habit of sacriﬁcing captured warriors in religious rituals. (Page 133)

Such acts of genocide, imperialist warfare were commonplace during the building of the Aztec and Incan Empires fetishized by Charles C. Mann and his disciples. immigration, and forced (Page 134)

In North America, the history of Indian tribes shows a similar pattern of warfare with little evident “moderation.” On the contrary, victorious tribes often found it expedient to exterminate enemy tribes altogether, so as to avoid the problem of retributive attacks. Women and children of defeated tribes were carted off and enslaved to ensure no continuation of enemy bloodlines and traditions. (Page 134)

These so-called Beaver Wars lasted for many decades; they witnessed the destruction of the Wendat people, the Neutral Indians, the fabled Mohicans, and many other tribes. (Page 134)

EATING YOUR ENEMIES (Page 135)

Compared with groups like the Aztecs, many North American Indians engaged in cannibalism only sporadically, out of necessity rather than as a matter of course (Page 135)

The Aztecs were notoriously short of large domesticable animals to use for food, so this steady ritual of human sacriﬁce met a social need for protein. The town where this occurred was previously named Zultapec—but after this windfall of sacriﬁcial victims, to “Tecoaque,” which meant “the place where they ate them.” its name was changed (Page 136)

MURDER IN THE NAME OF GOD (Page 136)

number of human sacriﬁces at the Aztec capital topped twenty thousand per year, with satellite cities sacriﬁcing smaller yet still signiﬁcant numbers. If the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan contained some two hundred thousand people in 1491, this suggests that a number of captives and slaves equal to fully 10 percent of the population of the city was sacriﬁced each year. (Page 137)

In the larger cities, the Mississippian culture was socially stratiﬁed, meaning that the priests’ and nobles’ lands were worked by slaves and forced labor. Prisoners captured in war were likely to end up either as slaves or sacriﬁcial victims for the community’s religious festivals. (Page 138)

human sacriﬁce was practiced by many Indian groups well into the historical period. (Page 138)

It is difﬁcult to avoid the conclusion that this ritual represents the exploitation of one social class by another. Chiefs utilized the incentive of increased social status, in return for the sacriﬁce of a child, in the hope that its death might help a chief recover from an illness. Knowing that one might be asked to sacriﬁce one’s child whenever the chief fell ill must have ﬁlled lower-status commoners in many tribes with dread. (Page 139)

NATIVE AMERICAN SLAVERY (Page 139)

Many accolades, including the coveted Bancroft Prize, have recently been heaped on a book called The Other Slavery, which catalogues the Amerindians who had been enslaved by Europeans over the course of the colonial era.76 This despite the general prohibition by most European governments against the enslavement of Indians. (Page 139)

incontestable fact that Indians enslaved far more Indians than Europeans ever did. (Page 139)

more Africans were enslaved by Indians in the New World, than Indians by Europeans. (Page 139)

Partly in order to supply the huge markets for sacriﬁcial victims, Mesoamerica was home to a huge and well-documented network of slave markets in the years prior to the Spanish conquest. (Page 140)

The idea that the Spanish or the English imported slavery to the New World is therefore utterly ridiculous. Slavery was widespread not only in Mesoamerica but also throughout the Indian tribes of the New World. Even far to the north, in present-day Canada, Native Americans routinely enslaved one another. (Page 140)

Comanche made slave raiding and trading a staple of their economy, until they became the terror of rival tribes for hundreds of miles around. (Page 140)

Modern people tend to forget the fact that slavery was a feature of almost every premodern culture. But slavery was ubiquitous in the New World for the same reason that it was common in the Old. Humans were continuously at war with one another, and when one is at war, a victory leaves few ways to dispose of the vanquished. One can either kill them (with the option to eat them for protein), enslave them, ransom them, or let them go. (Page 140)

In a premodern society, almost every task required a good deal of human labor, and any such slaves were extremely valuable. (Page 141)

Indians began to purchase African slaves in the seventeenth century, and they continued to own African slaves until after the US Civil War. Many modern articles attempt to spin Indian slavery as though it was adopted from Southern Americans, but, again, Amerindians had already been enslaving one another for centuries before the Southern Americans adopted African slavery in earnest.78 At most, then, the adoption of African slavery by the Five Civilized Tribes was merely an adaptation of preexisting practice. During the Trail of Tears marches of the 1830s, thousands of African slaves were moved westward, along with their Indian masters. In the lead-up to the Civil War, some tribes were split into pro- and anti-slavery factions; others, such as the Chickasaw Indians, remained committed to African slavery and sided with the Confederacy. (Page 142)

CRUELTY AND INHUMANE TREATMENT (Page 142)

An early account of how capturing parties amused themselves after a successful raid is described by the French explorer Samuel de Champlain. they selected a victim, and Having kindled a ﬁre, proceeded to excoriate his back with red-hot burning brands, and to apply live coals to the ends of his ﬁngers, where they would give the most exquisite pain. They tore out his ﬁnger-nails, and, with sharp slivers of wood, pierced his wrists and rudely forced out the quivering sinews. They ﬂayed off the skin from the top of his head, and poured (Page 142)

upon the bleeding wound a stream of boiling melted gum. Champlain remonstrated in vain. The piteous cries of the poor, tormented victim excited his unavailing compassion, and he turned away in anger and disgust. At length, when these inhuman tortures had been carried as far as they desired, Champlain was permitted, at his earnest request, with a musket-shot to put an end to his sufferings. But this was not the termination of the horrid performance. The dead victim was hacked in pieces, his heart severed into parts, and the surviving prisoners were ordered to eat it. (Page 143)

FEMALE SEX SLAVES (Page 144)

When Native American women were captured in war, they were often added to the capturing warrior’s wives. (Page 144)

Mary Jemison was a Scots-Irish girl captured by Indians (Page 144)

Those scalps I knew at the time must have been taken from our family by the color of the hair. My mother’s hair was red, and I could easily distinguish my father’s and the children’s from each other. That sight was most appalling, yet I was obliged to endure it without complaining (Page 145)

CHAPTER 8 WERE NATIVE AMERICANS NATURAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS? (Page 146)

In his 2020 book The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist Dave Graeber dismisses reams of scientiﬁc data that show modern people to be happier and healthier than ever; he also dismisses data showing how environmentalist movements are strongest in those countries where capitalism has been most successful. (Page 147)

THE PLEISTOCENE EXTINCTIONS (Page 148)

The reason Africa contains the majority of the world’s megafauna today is because they ﬁgured out how to live alongside these early humans, with their stone tools and javelins. It was not until the spread of modern riﬂes in the later nineteenth century that the animal populations of Africa came under serious threat. (Page 149)

to hunt is because Paleolithic humans were able Animal populations in other parts of the world fared less well—and this them successfully, after they developed stone-tipped weapons such as the spear and the bow and arrow. As humans fanned out across Europe and Asia beginning around 40,000 BC, they hunted large game that was less adapted to cope with their new hunting techniques. The result was the eventual extinction of many large animals from Europe, Asia, and Australia, including mammoths, cave bears, sabertoothed tigers, and the like. (Page 149)

On smaller islands, the coming of humans was usually catastrophic to Indigenous animal populations. (Page 149)

Shortly after the ﬁrst “Paleo-Indians” arrived in the New World, no fewer than thirty-eight genera of large mammals disappeared. In North America this included giant sloths, short-faced bears, tapirs, peccaries, giant tortoises, American cheetahs, the American lion, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, various species of camel including llamas, several now-extinct species of bison, the stag-moose, the shrub-ox, horses, mammoths, mastodons, the giant armadillo, giant beavers, giant condors, and thirteen out of fourteen species of American antelope. (Page 150)

Meanwhile, in South America, mass extinctions were concentrated in the time period after 8000 BC, which coincides with the ﬁrst arrival of large numbers of human hunters in that region. South America at the time had large populations of bears, capybaras, llamas, sabertooth cats, giant sloths, armadillos the size of a hippopotamus, camels, and rhinoceroses. Every single one of these species was gone by about 6000 BC. In all, every South American species larger than one hundred kilograms disappeared forever. (Page 150)

Such people hope to pin the Pleistocene extinctions on changes in the Earth’s climate. (Page 150)

This is why most scientists continue to favor the “overkill hypothesis.” The correlation with the arrival of human hunters is simply too strong to leave much room for any other interpretation. (Page 151)

The ﬁrst is that the extinctions left the New World people with precious few animals they could use for riding, work, or food. (Page 151)

unfortunate that the people who arrived from Siberia were still following Paleolithic patterns of migrating after herds of large game animals. These people did not have any domesticated animals, except perhaps dogs, and they neither used animals for work (such as ploughing) nor kept herds of grazing animals for milk, wool, or meat. Instead they simply killed and ate them all. (Page 151)

In the Old World, certain groups of humans hit upon the idea of domesticating oxen and other farm animals in the years after 8000 BC, and they learned to use some of them for ploughing around 6000 BC. (Page 151)

Old World agriculture was in turn driven by the use of plough animals; so, by Roman times Old World ploughing civilizations (which grew staples such as wheat and rice) were able to produce far more (Page 151)

calories per acre than societies that did not use an animal-drawn plough. This is a big part of why the Old World was so much more populous than the New by 1491 (Page 152)

The lack of riding animals in the New World also helped to make the playing ﬁeld unequal when the two cultures ﬁnally met. (Page 152)

If only today’s academics and activists would recognize that just as the Paleo-Indians had little means of assessing their impact on the megafauna of the New World, so too Europeans for most of the colonial period had no way of assessing their impact on the Indian populations and societies they found here. And by the later eighteenth century, when the problem of Indian population decline became more obvious, we will see that many European policymakers went to great lengths to protect these populations from further harm. (Page 153)

WERE HISTORICAL INDIANS ECOLOGICAL? (Page 153)

If Indians seemed to have a relatively small impact on nature and the natural world, this is partly because their ancestors had already done enormous damage to the ecosystem thousands of years before when they hunted the native megafauna to extinction. Indian populations stayed mobile, because their activities tended to deplete or scare off game after a few years. From the perspective of local and regional ecosystems, pre-Columbian Indian groups were regionally devastating enough. (Page 154)

evidence to suggest that Indian hunters were careful to preserve the numbers of game or that they were any more attentive to this issue than Europeans; both groups learned to harvest furs for market sale to the extent possible. There was little difference in the behavior of the two groups, even during the great slaughters of buffalo and other creatures that took place after the invention of modern ﬁrearms in the later nineteenth century. (Page 155)

CHAPTER 9 WERE NATIVE AMERICANS NATURAL COMMUNISTS? (Page 156)

A related reason to portray Indians as communistic is to portray them as morally superior to Europeans. According to this view, holding property in common instilled Indian culture with the values of caring, sharing, economic and social equality, sustainability, moderation, and humility. (Page 157)

Patrick Wolfe, the inventor of settler colonialism, went further, asserting that the essence of being an Indian was “collectivity,” or holding property in common. He writes that “tribal land was tribally owned—tribes and private property did not mix. Indians were the original communist menace.” (Page 158)

In this jocular aside Wolfe also implies a threat: Indian society was seen as threatening to European capitalism because it offered a viable alternative. Wolfe goes on to explain that Indians who accepted (the common and widespread) US government offers to become a homesteader became individual proprietors, each to his own, of separately allotted fragments of what had previously been the tribal estate, theirs to sell to white people if they chose to. Without the tribe, though, for all practical purposes they were no longer Indians. Here in essence is assimilation’s Faustian bargain—have our settler world but lose your Indigenous soul. Beyond any doubt, this is a kind of death. Assimilationists recognized this very clearly. (Page 159)

The idea that European land ownership was tied to “patriarchy” has impelled some feminist scholars to assert that Indian property holding systems were “matriarchal” while European property systems were “patriarchal.” According to Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood: “Post-colonial feminist theories and research have shown how the social institution of patriarchy, including sexual relationships, was fundamental to European military conquest, colonization, economic exploitation of indigenous people, and cultural entanglements. (Page 160)

By portraying the liberal-individualistic culture of the United States as a perpetrator of mass theft, slavery, and genocide, these commentators seek to undermine the Lockean foundations of the United States, in the hope of bringing about some version of socialist (Page 160)

collectivism. One important reason to debunk this myth is thus to deprive anti-liberal thinkers of one of the weapons in their ongoing war against capitalism, a war in which actual Indians typically want no part. (Page 161)

DID INDIANS OWN LAND? (Page 161)

One basic truth is clear: the nature of an Indian group’s economic activity was the main determinant of their property regimes. A few groups such as the Aztecs and Incas lived in permanent cities, and their property holdings were therefore more deﬁnite and more elaborate. These groups are sometimes called “state societies,” because their societies had a relatively well-developed concept of the state or, more precisely, of the city-state. Other groups of Indians lived in what we call “semi-sedentary villages,” and, ﬁnally, many groups were hunter-gatherers. (Page 162)

In state societies such as the Aztec Empire, land was organized similarly to ancient Mesopotamia. That is to say, there were lands that belonged to the major temples and the king, and there were lands that were reserved to the nobility. Each of these estates was worked either by slaves or conscripted labor. (Page 162)

In New England aboriginal societies, people lived in what are called “semipermanent” villages. They cleared ﬁelds by burning the underbrush and then farmed these for several years until the land and the hunting grounds around it became exhausted. After a generation or so, these people would move on to another area, where they would clear new ﬁelds and begin the process all over again. They usually roamed in the region of their settlement every season to maximize their hunting yield; they therefore combined hunting expeditions and life in temporary shelters with their more permanent residence. Semipermanent villages in such regions might number fewer than one hundred people, or they might attain a population of up to one thousand or even two thousand in exceptional cases. Indian groups However, encountered by the English seldom numbered more than a few hundred. this also explains why individual (Page 163)

the areas occupied by the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the South, Mississippian traditions of city-dwelling were combined with occasional mound- or midden-building in low-lying regions. These areas therefore featured somewhat larger, more permanent villages, though only in a few cases was an individual site occupied for more than a generation or two. (Page 164)

While feminist scholars such as Spencer-Wood or Jaimes Guerrero want to believe that Indian society was matriarchal, countless sources prove that it was nonetheless thoroughly “sexist” by modern standards, with women’s work being marginalized at least as much as in contemporary European society. (Page 164)

By the time the English arrived, most local groups had been subjected to a ruler, or sachem, who demanded payment. While each tribe might have a sachem, some sachems were more powerful than others. They might demand tribute from lesser sachems. Sachems were expected to consult with the village elite of their particular group, but they were generally considered to be above all others. Tribute was typically demanded in the form of food, animal products, beads, tools, clothing, and the like. Sachems had to be careful not to demand too much from a given group, and tributary arrangements were subject to continual change, as the power of individual chiefs and groups waxed and waned. (Page 165)

Semipermanent village societies therefore had a quasicommunistic way of holding land. The land belonged to the tribe; it was allotted to individuals every season or so, and the use of a given house might change regularly. Since groups migrated often, even seasonally, no one got attached to a particular area or house for very long. Some people have called landholding an “indigenous commons.” form of this (Page 166)

The answer to the question of whether Indians owned property, then, depends on the tribe and region. In permanently settled areas such as the Nahua-speaking area of central Mexico, individual households and noble families did make claims to speciﬁc houses and particular plots of land. Spanish authorities often went to surprising lengths to respect these claims in subsequent decades. By law, Indian land rights were honored by Spanish ofﬁcials, and lawsuits and other arrangements surrounding the Republicas de los Indios often involved claims of ownership. (Page 167)

The main problem is that the hunting grounds that made up the majority of land claims were by nature huge tracts of land that were virtually empty and devoid of any human habitation. For this reason, some commentators argued that hunting grounds should not be considered Indian property, since next to nothing was done with this land, except for annual hunting forays. They argued instead that only actively cultivated agricultural ground should be counted as tribal property. This was in line with the labor theory of value (ironically in this context favored by Karl Marx), which argued that something only belonged to a person when they “mixed their labor” with it. (Page 168)

In hunter-gatherer societies, which ranged over at least threefourths of New World land north of Panama, property ownership was always tenuous in the extreme. Property in these vast empty regions was claimed by small bands, who might visit it only every few years. Population density was well below one person per ten acres; often, it was much lower than this. (Page 168)

To claim that hunter-gatherer bands had sophisticated notions of property is to misunderstand how hunting and gathering economies worked. Such people followed rivers, and knew the lay of the land, but primarily they followed animals and sought out regions where game was plentiful. As early modern Europeans plainly realized, such groups had no need for 99 percent of the land they claimed, as soon as they gave up hunting and gathering, since a single small farm would provide more reliable calories than one hundred square miles of hunting and gathering territory every year. (Page 169)

Almost all the modern hubbub about land claims and land redistribution is therefore strongly anachronistic. It attempts to apply a modern agriculturalist’s logic (of high population density and extreme value for small plots of land due to high productivity of said land) to a hunter-gatherer society where populations were miniscule and land was next to valueless due to its extreme unproductivity. (Page 169)

DID INDIANS STEAL EACH OTHER’S LAND? (Page 169)

tribal anarchy means that no one group held a speciﬁc territory for more than a few generations before migration, food scarcity, warfare, or other upheavals changed the boundaries. (Page 170)

The idea that these lands permanently belonged to any of these groups is thus a Eurocentric ﬁction colored by our own familiarity with European property norms. (Page 170)

The speed with which Indian land changed hands from one tribe to another seems astonishing to those unfamiliar with this type of political system. We have already outlined the Indigenous political is a ﬁfteen-hundred-year history of Latin America, which archaeological record of conquest, forced migration, mass murder, dispossession, and sometimes the enslavement or extermination of entire ethnic groups. Meanwhile in early Virginia, the Jamestown settlers arrived to ﬁnd that Chief Powhatan had subjugated no fewer (Page 170)

than two dozen tribes during his own lifetime via a combination of warfare, intimidation, and intrigue. In Massachusetts, the Mohawks, Narragansetts, and Wampanoag had all displaced one another, or were threatening to do so, within a generation of the foundation of the Plymouth Colony. (Page 171)

The Five Nations group is thought to have been formed only a generation or two before French explorers contacted them, and the early years of French settlement in the region witnessed a number of horriﬁc (dare I say “genocidal”) encounters. (Page 171)

In the process of the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois “stole” land from the Hurons and other tribes equal in size to their original territory in New York State. Later on, the Iroquois continued their imperialist campaigns, ranging far to the south and west of their original territories. They destroyed the Erie Indians and the famed Mohicans, and conquered several other tribes. In the years around 1700, they ousted the Sioux Indians from West Virginia and Kentucky, who were forced by Iroquois aggression to vacate the land forever and to settle farther west on more marginal ground. The Iroquois thereafter claimed the Sioux hunting grounds for their own. (Page 171)

By 1780, the Iroquois Nation had stolen the equivalent of at least six times their original territory, all from neighboring tribes. From their (Page 171)

original base in New York State, they had emptied much of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and much of southern Ontario of its former inhabitants. (Page 172)

If anyone in seventeenth-century America can be considered genocidal, it should be the Iroquois, rather than the French or English. It is believed that the intra-Indian wars of attrition, which resulted in the expulsion of many tribes from the Great Lakes region, so fatally weakened Native populations in the area, that they had little choice but to abandon most of this land to American settler expansion in subsequent decades. (Page 172)

Meanwhile, shortly after 1700, a push by the Comanches displaced many Apache Indians, who in turn put pressure on the Pueblo Indians, raiding them and despoiling them of their own food supplies. The ﬁerce Comanche went on to displace, assimilate, and/or annihilate dozens of other tribes and smaller groups in a series of (Page 172)

well-documented attacks. Neighboring tribes feared them as a merciless scourge, and rightly so: like most other Native American tribes they routinely killed babies, tortured men, raped women, and enslaved children as they conquered (Page 173)

In short, the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of the future US held their land in a manner similar to that of other nomadic and seminomadic peoples across the globe. A tribe’s relationship with property depended on how much farming they did. Hunter-gatherers had only the lightest notion of tribal ownership. The vast majority of semipermanent village peoples’ land was hunting ground and scrub. These people held some lands in common, while key tracts were allotted to individuals. Control of land and resources depended very strongly on an individual’s status. The idea that Native Americans were “communistic” is therefore not particularly helpful. Tribes claimed certain territories for a while, but they might equally migrate to a new area, or else lose their current lands to the aggression of neighboring tribes. They were constantly engaged in an ages-old game of displacement, conquest, and territorial ﬂuidity, where no one tribe inhabited a certain area of land for more than a few generations. Because of their economic practices, the land was extremely thinly settled to the eyes of anyone who grew up in a farming society. To imagine that European colonization interrupted a natural process of tribal confederation and ultimate state formation is implausible at best. Lacking the military and economic technologies to bring an end to this ﬂuid, anarchic system, there is no prospect that Indian land claims would have become more permanent for many centuries to come. (Page 173)

CHAPTER 10 DID THE FOUNDERS STEAL DEMOCRACY FROM NATIVE AMERICANS? (Page 174)

His doctoral thesis was about the inﬂuence of Amerindians on the US Constitution, and he published a version of this as a book called Forgotten Founders: How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy. (Page 175)

Despite the fact that most academics regard Johansen and Grinde as a pair of snake oil salesmen, the inﬂuence of their theory on American culture has not been negligible. (Page 176)

THE IROQUOIS CONSTITUTION (Page 176)

The major problem, once again, is that we have no written records about Iroquois government dating from before European contact. Indeed, the mobile nature of Iroquois society meant that we possess very few physical artifacts from the precontact period at all. (Page 176)

The Iroquois had no system of writing; Richard Barry’s notion that the Iroquois constitution had been “written down” on “parchment” in 1520 is therefore completely fallacious. (Page 176)

fact that John Adams could write an enormous, three-volume account of hundreds of historical republics ancient and modern, without listing the Iroquois among them, suggests that the Founding Fathers had only foggy reports about how the Iroquois constitution worked at the time the US Constitution was being written.98 (Page 177)

later The classic Iroquois Confederacy was an alliance of six tribes—the the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora. By the time Europeans made contact with them, each of their chiefs was hereditary rather than elected. Indeed, the French commentator Chateaubriand described the Iroquois and Hurons as having a number of “aristocratic republics,” where noble families held power, while consulting a number of interlocking and overlapping elected councils.99 Chateaubriand described the system as “extremely complicated,” though he does praise the system for making full use of the rhetorical and intellectual talents of women— something he regretted that European political schemes had not yet (Page 178)

managed to do. Chateaubriand, like many earlier commentators, likewise praised the Huron and Iroquois for high degrees of eloquence at their meetings. (Page 179)

THE ACTUAL ORIGINS OF THE US CONSTITUTION (Page 180)

Most framers of the US Constitution were steeped in the “classical” literature of the Greeks and Romans. (Page 180)

The standard form of education for men such as Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison was to be tutored from an early age until they were ﬂuent not only in modern languages such as French but also in Latin and Greek. Alexander Hamilton is regarded as a founder of the Philolexian Society at Columbia University—the elaborate-sounding Greek name means “lovers of words.” Even the famously self-educated Franklin spent two years of his youth at a Latin school. For such men, the idea of eloquence was tied to GrecoRoman ideals embodied by the likes of Cato and Cicero. (Page 180)

But the Founding Fathers did not have to look back two thousand years to ﬁnd a blueprint for democracy. Dozens of colonial legislatures, assemblies, governing bodies, commissions, and charters already existed in the British colonial empire. The British had no formal constitution, but the Magna Carta of 1215 guaranteed such freedoms as the right to habeas corpus and trial by jury, and they had proclaimed a Bill of Rights in 1689. (Page 180)

As John Adams pointed out, Western Europe provided any number of examples of modern-day republics during the 1770s and ’80s. Italian republics such as Genoa, Milan, Florence, Siena, and Venice contributed to the European political landscape for hundreds of years, and the Republic of Venice was not disbanded until Napoleon conquered it in 1797. Meanwhile, the Dutch state was a constitutional monarchy, in which parliaments and assemblies at the local, regional, and national levels often had ultimate authority. The Dutch had colonized New York and the Hudson River valley, thereby spreading their republican ideas to the New World. In fact, the Pilgrim fathers set out on their journey to Plymouth Rock from the Dutch city of Leiden, where they had sheltered for several years from English religious prejudice. Even more inﬂuential was the ancient Swiss Republic of Helvetia, which included the Calvinist Republic of Geneva together with other democratically run provinces or cantons. (Page 181)

Thomas Hobbes argued that anarchy was the only possible outcome of any attempt to do away with a strong king. JeanJacques Rousseau seemed to argue that people would be best off with a participatory democracy. Even Rousseau, however, who famously promoted the idea of the unspoiled and innocent Noble Savage, did not advocate the adoption of an Iroquois constitution by European societies. (Page 182)

The Iroquois leaders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were remarkably successful at creating a that maintained peace between previously fractious tribes. Their system, though it contained strong elements of class stratiﬁcation, nonetheless provided an admirable amount of agency for large sections of the population, including many women. This is a remarkable achievement deserving study and recognition. large-scale, stable government (Page 182)

The peoples of the New World were not primitive or backward; they had advanced considerably in technology and culture since their Paleolithic ancestors crossed the Alaska land bridge before 10,000 BC. The most advanced areas of New World culture were the population centers of greater central Mexico and greater Peru. These areas witnessed several waves of cultural advancement, culminating in such achievements as proto-writing, record keeping, elaborate religious rituals, and advanced stone architecture. (Page 183)

By 1491, they had attained technological levels similar to Old World in 3000 BC. This was a remarkable achievement civilizations considering the much smaller population base of the New World, whose geography was less civilization-friendly than that of the Old World. (Page 183)

Meanwhile, nearly all the stereotypes about American Indians that the Left holds dear are traceable to the naivete of the 1970s progressive movement. Almost all these stereotypes arose in white, middle-class American households; they generally reﬂect liberal talking points such as environmentalism, anti-capitalism, and the peace movement. As such they are anachronistic projections not ﬁrmly grounded in real historical analysis. (Page 184)

Native American society was far from peaceful and benevolent—it was as brutal as any other of its day, and frequently more so. The history of the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan Empires, such as we can reconstruct it from archaeological sources, is a dreary litany of occupation, depopulation, mass enslavement, and mass sacriﬁce. The Aztecs ruled by maintaining a reign of terror over subject populations, to the point of routinely harvesting subject populations as sacriﬁcial victims. The fact that this reality is not acknowledged by modern activist historians is for all practical purposes a deliberate coverup borne of embarrassment. (Page 184)

III AMERICAN DISPLACEMENT (Page 185)

CHAPTER 11 IS THANKSGIVING RACIST? (Page 186)

The historical basis for Thanksgiving rests on a handful of sentences scribbled by the Plymouth colonist Edward Winslow. He notes that in 1621, Governor William Bradford invited the Wampanoag chief Massasoit and his people to a three-day harvest festival. Winslow notes how “[with] many of the Indians coming among us… we [engaged in] recreations…[and] entertained and feasted with them.” He further describes how the Indians “went out and killed ﬁve Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain (Miles Standish), and others.” The celebration was held partly in gratitude to friendly Indians such as Squanto, who helped teach the settlers how to grow crops in their new environment. (Page 187)

The historical ﬁrst Thanksgiving resulted in a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag that lasted more than two generations, until the outbreak of King Philip’s War in the 1670s. As historical achievements go, two generations of peace are not terribly shabby. Until recently, Thanksgiving was accepted as a festival of togetherness: a recognition that despite differences and a history of violence, even people of wildly varied backgrounds could overcome their differences. Previous generations understood that violence was normative among both Indians and Europeans, and that Europeans were at least somewhat guilty of destroying the Indians’ way of life. Still, Americans took Thanksgiving as a symbol of hope, a sense that striving for peace and unity was a noble goal on which all people could agree. Underneath, it reinforced the important idea of e pluribus unum—that despite our many differences, it is still better if we strive to live as one people, under a single set of democratic institutions. Our ancestors realized better than we do just how open-minded and tolerant our immigrant society has made us, in stark contrast to many Old World societies where people have been living in the same place for centuries. Though these ideas ﬂew under the radar of most “Turkey Day” celebrants, there was always, at base, a pro-democracy and pro-tolerance message at the root of it. This is part of why Thanksgiving and its story were more than “just a holiday.” (Page 188)

HOW FREQUENT WAS SETTLER-INDIAN WARFARE? (Page 189)

to represent one-sided Despite the relative rarity of such massacres in New England history, they feature prominently in popular articles on Thanksgiving. Such portrayals are distorted from multiple angles. First, they are spun instances of colonist-on-Indian aggression. Secondly, they are spun to appear unprovoked. Third, they are spun as though they were motivated by racial hatred and a desire for ethnic cleansing above all else, based on an underlying greed for land. And ﬁnally, they are spun as though this sort of thing was happening all the time—as though they were typical of and “stand for” early New England history. All four of these interpretations are false, or at least misleading. (Page 190)

The charge of continuous warfare is a highly embellished view of colonial New England history. According to William M. Osborn, who incidentally is cited on the “Indian Massacres” page referenced above, the total casualties of Indian-settler massacres between 1511 (Page 190)

and 1890 were about 7,193 Natives who died at the hands of Europeans, and about 9,156 Europeans who died at the hands of Native Americans. (Page 191)

important to remember that for all this talk of massacre, the numbers involved were surprisingly small. (Page 191)

Not only this, but often—as in the case of both the Mystic and Great Swamp Massacres—the perpetrators were colonists and their Indian allies. In many cases, it’s next to impossible for anyone to say whether the majority of killings were carried out by colonists or by Indian warriors thirsty for revenge against their enemies. We have already seen how hundreds of eyewitness accounts attest to the brutality of Indian revenge killings, which often resulted in the assimilation or literal genocide of neighboring tribes. And certainly, when Indians and colonists were working together as allies during a time of war, to imply that slaughters perpetrated by the allies were “racially motivated” is farcical. (Page 191)

The Indian wars of the 1670s destroyed decades of patient work, which saw both Indian and colonial leaders lay the foundations for a (Page 191)

multiethnic society across New England. To pretend that destruction and division was one-sided and routine is to completely ignore the “lived experience” of thousands of New Englanders who wanted to create a multicultural society even in the seventeenth century. (Page 192)

When war did break out, it often took the colonists by surprise. The largest scale colonial-Indian wars typically began with surprise attacks by to orchestrate a response. Indians, which saw reeling colonists scramble (Page 192)

In Virginia, the year 1622 saw the Powhatan Indians precipitate a war on the colonists, beginning with a surprise attack. (Page 192)

In the Pequot War of 1636–37, the Connecticut colony suffered months of raids on military forts and stockpiles without declaring an offensive war against the Indians. (Page 193)

King Philip’s War in the 1670s also began with a surprise attack by Indians. It too resulted in the massacre of a large number of colonists. (Page 193)

In the series of massacres perpetrated in 1675–76, the death toll to the colonists was fully twenty-ﬁve hundred people— approximately one-third of the total population of New England. (Page 193)

After the 1670s, major conﬂict between the English and the Indians did not occur again until the French and Indian War of 1754–63—the better part of a century later. Hostilities once again began with Indian raids on widely scattered colonial farmsteads, resulting in the massacre and capture of colonists along long stretches of frontier. Many colonists were taken by surprise, because they were used to generations of peaceful relations and trade with the Indians who lived nearby (Page 194)

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PILGRIMS (Page 194)

Silverman ignores the fact that the Pilgrims who “ransacked” Indian corn supplies and houses were going through areas that they believed to have been left waste by the recent plague, which had claimed perhaps 90 percent of the local population. He is honest enough to mention that the Europeans intentionally left some of the most important graves untouched; he also mentions that the English were careful to put most of the grave goods back in place, because they did “not wish to be odious” to the Indians. (Page 195)

Silverman alleges that the “theft” of a few bushels of corn would “leave the Indians starving,” while it was obvious to all involved that a population reduced by 90 percent would not need every bushel; for all the settlers knew it had been totally abandoned. Time showed that the settlers did, in fact, pay the Indians back for this corn and other goods. (Page 195)

WERE INDIANS ENSLAVED BY THE ENGLISH? (Page 196)

In 1614, the soon-to-be-notorious English captain Thomas Hunt led a pillaging expedition down the coast of New England, in which he carried off twenty-four Indians as captives to be sold in Spain. (Page 196)

In reality, Hunt’s actions were atypical; indeed, the fact that Hunt became infamous in local Indian lore for a generation suggests that his behavior was the exception rather than the rule. If Hunt’s behavior was so typical, why was all of eastern Massachusetts still enraged at him years after the fact? And why did the subsequent shipwreck of a French ship lead to the murder and enslavement of the crew, in retaliation for his actions? In fact, Hunt’s raid caused no end of headaches for subsequent traders and would-be colonists, since that single action caused unusual levels of ill will between Indians and Europeans for many years to come. (Page 196)

Thomas Hunt’s “slave raid” belies a number of complexities that go unremarked in Silverman’s account. For example, the reason Hunt wanted to sell Indians in Iberia is because no other port in Atlantic Europe had slave markets. Most European authorities did not allow slave markets in their territories; the ban on slave markets had become commonplace in most of Europe during the later Middle Ages. In England, a famous court case of 1559 determined that English air was “too pure for a slave to breathe in,” and the custom became entrenched that anyone, of any race, became free from any taint of slavery the moment they set foot on English soil.103 This “free soil” principle also became law in France and the Netherlands, for example. (Page 197)

even in Spain, the 1512 Laws of Burgos and the 1542 Laws for the Protection of the Indians outlawed the slavery of Indigenous Americans (Page 197)

In sum, only a few hundred Indians are recorded as having been taken as slaves from New England during the seventeenth century; most were taken as prisoners during King Philip’s War. What modern write-ups seldom mention is that a far greater number of New England Indians, almost certainly reaching ﬁve ﬁgures, were captured and enslaved by other Indians during this period. As Silverman himself mentions, “Indians in southern New England, as throughout North America, ranked captive taking among their primary war aims. Whereas they executed most adult male captives [and old people and babies], the women and children would have been spared and adopted after a period of debasement.” (Page 198)

IS THANKSGIVING RACIST? (Page 198)

A better solution is to keep Thanksgiving for what it is—like most traditions, it can be adapted for modern sensibilities. This can be done by reminding children that while the holiday represents a symbol of hope and togetherness, that things did not always work out that way in practice. The holiday can therefore be a time of respect for Indigenous rights, while at the same time acknowledging that what the Europeans brought to the table was in balance somewhat more positive than Silverman’s “trail of blood and mourning.” (Page 199)

CHAPTER 12 WAS POCAHONTAS A RACE TRAITOR? (Page 200)

The 1619 Project is named after the fact that the ﬁrst documented African slaves in the English colonies of the future US were brought to Jamestown in 1619. The project’s lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, chose the name because she wanted to preempt the 1620 landing of the Pilgrims by a year. Her goal was to ﬁx America’s attention on the idea that even before the Pilgrims landed, slavery lay at the crux of American history. The Project’s authors allege that Virginia colonists routinely enslaved Indians as well as AfricanAmericans and that this was a core of the early colony’s economy. Both of these claims are greatly exaggerated, since Indian slavery was and remained rare, and African slavery in Virginia remained nascent for the better part of one hundred years after the foundation of the colony. (Page 201)

Pocahontas was used as a bargaining chip, and Powhatan soon recovered her in exchange for several colonists. During her captivity, the minister Alexander Whitaker introduced her to Christianity, and she later converted, taking the English name Rebecca. She is alleged to have told her father that she preferred to stay with the colonists, because of the good treatment they showed during her captivity. Given what we know of other early Indians such as Squanto and hundreds of others who would voluntarily join seventeenth-century colonial schools, the idea that Pocahontas preferred life among the English is not far-fetched. (Page 202)

is a very important point the conquistadors were so that modern This commentators anachronistically disregard. In seventeenth-century Europe, the distinction between nobility and commoners was fundamental. It was believed that nobles were innately superior. This is why Indian “noblewomen” across Latin America—they believed that they were “marrying up” and therefore bequeathing their children a noble status. They further expected the Crown of Spain to award privileges to them based on the status of their Indian blood relations, just as was the case throughout Europe. Europeans who dealt with countries as far aﬁeld as Morocco, Turkey, and Russia also expected to ﬁnd a noble or gentle class in those societies and expected to accord them special honors, just as they did at home. to marry ready (Page 203)

According to the historian Robert S. Tilton, the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe actually caused consternation in some English circles, because people believed it was improper for a commoner (Rolfe) to marry such a high-born noblewoman. (Page 204)

INTERRACIAL LIFE ON THE FRONTIER (Page 204)

recognizing The Amerindian world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was intensely local, and intensely tribal. The idea that they identiﬁed with one another in racial terms is completely anachronistic, based on a late nineteenth-century worldview that today’s Amerindian and mixed-race people have adopted without its inapplicability to earlier periods. Today, many American Indians will tell you that they feel like a member of their tribe ﬁrst and like an “Indian” second. This same inability to apply racial logic applies to most Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Page 205)

We have already seen how the Spanish formed interracial households with Indigenous people across Latin America. The English proved more standofﬁsh than the Spanish and French, partly because the Indian populations of the English colonial areas were much lower relative to the numbers of English colonists. However, to pretend that English and Indian people did not regularly trade or communicate in a friendly manner is also wide of the mark. (Page 205)

intermarried with the The phenomenon of the individual Indian living and working among the colonists therefore became commonplace during the seventeenth century. Indian children were adopted and taken into English local households, where they eventually population. Sometimes, Indian children were indentured to European families as surety for debts; this echoed a practice that was common among the Indians themselves. Modern commentators invariably cluck their tongues when they hear of such things, but they forget what we have already learned in an earlier chapter. Namely, that forced intertribal adoption—often as the result of kidnapping or raiding that resulted in the death of a child’s father—was completely normative in Indian society. (Page 206)

Except during times of war, Indians and colonists traded, taught, relaxed, exchanged knowledge, and built friendships with one another. (Page 207)

is What Preston’s book drives home the sheer variety of interactions between settlers and Indians. Far from the drab, onesided victim narratives that get published today, the actual historical record presents a smorgasbord of human interactions of every conceivable type, ranging from true love and lifelong friendship to casual drinking and carousing, long- and short-term business partnerships, to animosity, violence, rape, and murder. (Page 208)

CHAPTER 13 WAS AMERICA STOLEN? (Page 209)

This so-called Walking Purchase has long been recognized as one of the more egregious instances of fraud to be perpetrated on the North American Indians throughout the English colonial period. The question that stands before us in this chapter is: Was the Walking Purchase normative? Was this fraud typical of the way in which the English acquired Indian land? (Page 210)

So, we can ask again: Was the Walking Purchase “typical”? Or was the Long Peace of 1682–1737 more typical? Was the defrauding of the Lenape “typical”? Or was the providence of food, shelter, education, and land to many individual Lenape more typical of colonial behavior? The simple answer is: it’s complicated, but on balance, it is difﬁcult to (Page 211)

escape the conclusion that more colonists were kind to the Indians, more of the time, than they were cruel or treacherous to them. (Page 212)

Is the United States fundamentally illegitimate as a result of the theft of Indian land, as Claudio Saunt argues in his 2020 book Unworthy Republic? Is it any less “worthy” than Russia, Iran, or China, which were built on the displacement and extermination of much larger minority groups than the Amerindians—some of which is still ongoing today? Is it less “legitimate” or “worthy” than an African country with a history of pre- and post-independence ethnic cleansing? What about Nigeria, whose slaving empire of Benin enabled the transatlantic slave trade by selling captured African rivals to Europeans and Muslims alike? (Page 212)

As with many of in the 1970s. A key title the other anti-European myths we have addressed, the “stolen ground” myth began in earnest during the high point of academic Marxism is the Pennsylvania historian Francis Jennings’s The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. This book was reissued in recent years and during the 2010s rose to new heights of popularity on Amazon. The 2010s saw a number of new titles push the “stolen ground” theme; one of these was Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West by Ned Blackhawk. Compared with later narratives, however, Blackhawk’s book remains fairly cautious and scientiﬁc in its treatment of the southwest Indians in the years after 1750. (Page 213)

It is sad, even pathetic, to think that so many intellectuals could fall into such a childish way of perceiving the world, where the only way to praise non-Europeans is to trash Europeans—as though history were a zero-sum game—but that’s where we’re at. (Page 214)

THE TIME FRAME OF COLONIZATION (Page 215)

The ﬁrst inconvenient fact that confronts the “stolen ground” ideologues is that for most of the ﬁve hundred years since Columbus, over 90 percent of North America belonged to the Indians. In the early 1800s, fully three hundred years after Columbus discovered America, Europeans still inhabited only a fringe of the North American landmass. This has been amply attested by such beloved recent studies as Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent, and it ﬂies in the face of those who promote the erroneous idea that Europeans began stealing land with Columbus and Cortes, and continued in an uninterrupted orgy of theft until the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. (Page 215)

90 percent of modern America changed hands from Indian to American ownership over a single ﬁfty-year period between 1830 and 1880. (Page 216)

then how were the Indians still in possession of most of North America as late as 1830? The answer depends on three factors. First is the historical goal of European colonization. Second is the technology factor, and third is a grudging respect for Indian land rights, which were simultaneously respected in some quarters even as they were violated in others. (Page 217)

For the ﬁrst two centuries at least, they were working from the same model they had employed in Asia and Africa. This model was based on trade rather than conquest, and its primary method was to create small trading forts in coastal areas, surrounded by a few external ﬁelds that could provide food for a handful of settlers. In Asia and Africa, Europeans realized that it would be futile to attempt any conquests inland—the people of those continents were too numerous and too formidable, even if less advanced technologically. (Page 217)

The Indians proved adept at transforming their economic life to supply furs to European agents. They accordingly forged new political alliances and claimed new territories based on the location of European trading stations. This change in economic orientation brought the Indians a wealth of European products that they quickly found they could not do without, including metal tools, textiles, ﬁrearms, and alcohol. (Page 218)

in fact Indians had retreated It was only gradually, over the course of several generations, that the English shifted their focus toward farming and colonization. Most of this was simple opportunism, which occurred as Indian populations dwindled through a combination of disease, warfare, assimilation, intertribal violence, and migration. While the New England model of small towns appears to have spread it took several rapidly through some lowland regions, from most of generations before Massachusetts. the (Page 218)

We can now turn to our second factor that affected the pace of European colonization in North America: the technology factor. The Industrial Revolution marked a decisive turning point in the European (Page 218)

ability to colonize the globe, but this did not happen until the midnineteenth century. Europeans clung to the coasts of Africa and Asia until very late. So it was in North America. In the Old World, the invention of modern weaponry such as howitzers and machine guns ﬁnally gave Europeans enough ﬁrepower to overwhelm traditional Muslim, African, and Asian armies. Before that time, European armies were kept in check by troops armed with primitive ﬁrearms and traditional weapons and sometimes suffered signiﬁcant defeats. (Page 219)

Perhaps more importantly, the Industrial Revolution also brought a revolution in logistics. The invention of the steamship and the locomotive provided faster and more reliable transportation both at sea and on land. The invention of the telegraph provided instant communication across long distances. The dawn of modern medicine brought sanitation, vaccines, and medicines such as aspirin and quinine, which helped to make tropical areas more survivable. All these factors made American transcontinental expansion far more feasible than it had been only a few generations before. (Page 219)

Our third factor is the fact that Europeans did have grudging respect for Indian property rights, when these were properly spelled out. European court systems did not like to see property rights abnegated for no reason, and Indians quickly learned that deeds and treaties often gave them some form of redress against white land speculators. We have already seen how many European powers sought to limit the ability of Europeans to encroach on Indian land. tracts where The Spanish created separate “republics”—large Indians owned and managed land largely unmolested for the better part of three centuries. Farther north, both the French and the British Iroquois for centuries confederation as sovereign powers whose boundaries were to be respected. Dutch administrators made it a point of pride to respect Indian property claims in the Hudson Valley, and to gain land by voluntary sale rather than trickery. In this, they saw themselves as Indian polities such as treated the (Page 219)

morally superior to their traditional enemies, the Spanish.107 Respect for Indian political boundaries usually coincided with French and British policy goals, and so this tended to happen more often than not. (Page 220)

The famous Albany Congress of 1754 saw the British meet with delegates from the Iroquois nation. This eventually resulted in the British Proclamation Line of 1763, which forbade any European settlers from settling or even buying land west of the Appalachian Mountains. In creating and enforcing this line, the British government showed itself willing to defy the wishes of many American colonists in the interest of maintaining peace with the Indians. This was a decision that took a signiﬁcant amount of political will, and it should be recognized as such. It renders ridiculous the theory of settler colonialism and the idea that Europeans were racially motivated to remove and exterminate all Indians. (Page 220)

The American government for the most part inherited this British sense of property rights and fair dealing. They therefore sought for several decades to create a barrier across which European settlers were not allowed to cross. Of course, there were many settlers who deﬁed their governments and blazed into Indian territory despite these treaties (Page 220)

the fact that both the British and American governments tried to enforce strict “no settlement” zones over a period of many decades deserves a prominent place in the mainstream narrative. (Page 220)

Taken together, these three factors of intent, technology, and respect for Indian land rights help to explain why Europeans and Americans did not “steal” most of North America from the Indians until as late as the 1830s (Page 221)

PURCHASED, NOT STOLEN (Page 221)

Another important fact that the stolen land theory overlooks is that the great majority of American land settled by Europeans before about 1810 was purchased from the Indians who willingly sold it via a bourgeoning land market. (Page 221)

The main way to acquire land in Europe since the later Middle Ages was to purchase it. Europeans developed the institution of the notary, one of whose main jobs was to register land purchases at public ofﬁces in permanent form so that any disputed claims could be settled quickly. Europeans also developed different ways to ﬁnance the purchase of land, including mortgages. These institutions were centuries old when the English began settling North America, and to expect them to acquire land in any other way is to fundamentally misunderstand the British mentality during the ﬁrst centuries of colonization. (Page 221)

A speciﬁc acre of land was relatively valueless to hunter-gatherer Indians, while agriculturalist colonists might value it highly. (Page 222)

This is the major principle behind the purchase of Manhattan and Staten Islands by the Dutch administrator Peter Minuit in the 1620s. People today call foul because the value of the trade goods given for the islands was relatively small, only a few thousand dollars in today’s prices. However, the value of these trade goods to the Indians, who were encountering them for the ﬁrst time, would have been close to inestimable. The Europeans offered them ﬁrearms; textiles; metal tools such as axe heads, hoes, and kettles; wampum, which the Indians already valued; and drills. (Page 222)

In the 1620s, there would have been no way to know whether the Europeans were there to stay or, like previous groups of Europeans who had been visiting North America for a century or more, they would prove nothing more than transient interlopers. (Page 222)

The majority of land that changed hands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries along the eastern seaboard was therefore not taken by some Walking Purchase–style fraud; instead, it was voluntarily sold by the Indians in just such a market. They did not for the most part feel as though they had been duped, or the market would not have worked as well as it did. (Page 223)

Greer reminds us that while this exchange was often unequal, it was not unilateral. Though it was often done under duress, it was more often done on a voluntary basis. (Page 224)

Once Indians became outnumbered by colonists, a process that occurred in much of lowland New England after a generation or two, then as soon as it became legal for Indians to sell land it was inevitable that they would eventually do so. (Page 225)

Many Indians did settle down to farm, either by marrying farmers or by making a decision to shift lifestyles. (Page 225)

The Mohican tribe is a well-documented example of this gradual assimilation. (Page 226)

During the seventeenth century, the Mohawks waged a number of genocidal wars against the Mohicans, eventually driving their remnants into the arms of the European colonists. (Page 226)

THE PROBLEM OF POPULATION (Page 227)

precipitous dwindling of the North American Indian population during the period between 1600 and 1800. This left the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi practically vacant by the time Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By 1810, the entire Iroquois nation probably amounted to inhabited an area individuals. These some thousand ten (Page 227)

encompassing more than eight modern US states along the southern Great Lakes, with large swaths of modern-day Ontario in Canada thrown in. (Page 228)

Besides the Iroquois, the only other signiﬁcant Indian populations on the borders of the United States in 1783 were the so-called Five Civilized Nations of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians. They were called “civilized” because as heirs to the Mississippian customs, they tended to be more sedentary, to rely more heavily on farming, and therefore to build more permanent villages. (Page 228)

During the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century, the main reason that US population increased was due to an abundance of food. The agriculture practiced by the colonists was very efﬁcient and produced (Page 228)

many calories per acre. By 1810 the US census registered over seven million people, and by 1820, the population was nearly ten million. While the Indian population east of the Mississippi actually began to grow somewhat during this time—in part because of the robust Indian-protection policies of Indians nonetheless remained hopelessly outnumbered by a factor of one hundred to one. the US government—the (Page 229)

This ratio, incidentally, is similar to the Indian population ratio of the United States today. Today it is estimated that perhaps one million Indians live on reservations in the US (including Alaska); meanwhile, perhaps four to ﬁve claim to be “American Indian” on their US census forms. For those who wish to claim a nineteenth-century “genocide,” the fact that the US Indian population has remained steady proportional to the overall US population since 1810, despite massive immigration from Europe in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a simple and clear refutation. (Page 229)

Intermarriage was encouraged by the nearly universal Indian practice of adopting people from other tribes to make up for their own lack of numbers. This incidentally suggests that for them the important issue was the survival of a tribal way of life, rather than any concept of racial purity. (Page 230)

Specialists know that massacres and other deliberate acts of violence accounted for less than 1 percent of Indian population decline. With a mere ten thousand to twenty thousand Indians falling in European-instigated massacres over four centuries of English and American colonization, out of an overall population of millions, it is difﬁcult to blame massacre and murder for the fact that Indian populations did not recover. (Page 230)

The real reason the Amerindian population east of the Mississippi was already so small by 1800 is not due to the theft of Indian land, or genocidal policies, but to a combination of more mundane factors. First was the inefﬁciency of hunting and gathering. Second was to disease. Third was Amerindian Amerindian susceptibility aggression by the likes of the Iroquois, which reshaped Amerindian society from within, and made population replacement difﬁcult. Fourth was gradual assimilation into farming society. (Page 230)

WAS INDIAN LAND STOLEN? (Page 230)

The “stolen land” chorus cherrypicks two generations out of twentyodd which saw the ﬂipping of most of North America from Indigenous to settler control. They write as though these two generations are representative of the other twenty. These historians crow about how most of North America remained under Indigenous control until the nineteenth century, and in the same breath lambast every generation of European settlers as thieves, even if they lived at a time when the borders were relatively static. They ignore the fact that by this time the population ratio of Europeans to Indigenous had fallen—through no one’s fault—to a ratio of roughly 100:1. They forget that market forces would have redistributed land until Natives held far less than they originally had, and they forget that most Natives at the time wanted it this way (or else they would not have traded with Europeans, which they did). They cheer the agency of Indigenous people throughout the encounter period, but ignore Indian agency whenever Indians voluntarily traded land for other goods they wanted. (Page 231)

This is not to say that Europeans were guiltless—far from it. I agree completely with Allan Greer that the odds were generally tilted against the Indigenous people of the Americas and that Europeans by dint of their superior numbers, technology, and organization tended to hold more of the cards. Many people cheated when they thought they could get away with it—as is unfortunately the case with people throughout the world today. (Page 232)

CHAPTER 14 WERE THE FOUNDING FATHERS ANTI-INDIAN? (Page 233)

One thing has long been clear to historians who study the Founding Fathers with a modicum of objectivity: they were exceptional men to whom every person alive owes a deep debt of gratitude. Of course they had their faults, sometimes glaring ones. Historians have written many books analyzing these faults and shortcomings. Few serious historians in recent decades have sought to whitewash or conceal these imperfections. Yet, as a rule, historians before circa 2016 concluded that the American founders were for the most part principled, moral, upright, well-intentioned, wise, humane, and effective at advancing the cause of democracy. So much so that the American pantheon compares favorably with any comparable political elite in history. (Page 234)

Nor does Rolo seem to recognize that in the eighteenth century the word “savage” had a different connotation than it does today. In French, sauvage does not mean brutal and ignorant but simply “people who live out of doors, and close to nature.” This is the sense in which the popular epithet “Noble Savages” was used. The idea derived from the inﬂuential writings of Rousseau, who argued that civilization had corrupted man’s natural innocence, which could still be observed in the unspoiled peoples of the New World. (Page 235)

THE WISDOM OF BEN FRANKLIN (Page 235)

He was one of the most cosmopolitan and broadminded members of the founding elite. (Page 236)

his admiration for the Iroquois confederation. (Page 236)

Franklin felt that providing the Indians with tools for economic independence was much more important than sending missionaries. (Page 236)

Franklin believed that if the English could encourage Indians to learn smithing—perhaps by having their children grow up around blacksmiths—this would lead them to become self-sufﬁcient as a society and less vulnerable to white encroachment. In this, one sees nothing except respect for the Indian way of life, a desire to strengthen and protect it, and an expectation that it would continue in a similar fashion for decades if not centuries to come. (Page 236)

Esteemed as one of the greatest American minds of the late colonial period, Franklin’s remarks did much to set the tone for how Native Americans would be viewed both in Europe and America. Anyone looking for evidence of prejudice, racism, meanness, cultural chauvinism, greed for Indian land, or a desire to replace their culture and religion with those of Europe will be sorely disappointed. (Page 237)

WASHINGTON AND THE BEGINNINGS OF US INDIAN POLICY (Page 237)

At ﬁrst he was more desirous to acquire Indian lands, but later he (Page 237)

became increasingly protective of Indian welfare. His greatest fault, according to Harless, is that like John Eliot and many others before him he believed the only practical solution for the increasingly outnumbered Indians was that they eventually learn how to farm.112 This he advised both their own protection and material improvement and so that they would stop being a security threat to American citizens. for (Page 238)

Registering Indian land with an actual notary was considered one way to establish irrefutable legal tenure. Even though this was sometimes violated (as it would be by the Jackson administration), the logic behind land ownership and the protection of Indian land rights was generally sound. And while modern activists might ﬁnd fault with this policy—in reality, was there any other solution on the table? What would these activists propose instead? (Page 238)

This is why Washington—and Jefferson after him—was keen to secure key tracts of land as buffers to protect American settlers from Indian massacres. Washington’s concerns were not for the frontier settlers alone, however; the mere threat of stirring up Indian anger on the frontier was an effective foreign policy tool for any European power who wished to threaten the United States. To this end, Washington’s chief Indian policy was to create a new version of the Proclamation Line of 1763. Washington at the time had no way of the US would soon purchase Louisiana. Even knowing Jefferson’s agents in Paris were shocked when Napoleon offered the whole territory to them early in 1803. that (Page 239)

In 1783, Washington was still hopeful that a strong line could be established to protect both settlers and Indians. As soon as the Revolutionary War was over, Washington wrote to James Duane, arguing for the establishment of a ﬁrm line of settlement between the US and the Indians. He also noted that the US was going to be magnanimous in peace—even though by right of war, they could have expelled all Indians across the border to Canada, since many tribes had allied with the British during the war. (Page 240)

As to how to administer Indian Affairs, Washington advised that American ofﬁcials must be held to the strictest standards of discipline and morality: for far agents Indian Affairs are How indispensably necessary I shall not take upon me to decide; but if any should be appointed, their powers in my opinion should be circumscribed, accurately deﬁned, and themselves rigidly punished for every infraction of them. Nor should the agents be permitted directly or indirectly to trade; but to have a ﬁxed, and ample salary allowed them as a full compensation for their trouble. (Page 241)

Washington therefore strove throughout his presidency to encourage the Indians to live in ways that would help them better resist the settler onslaught. He realized that the major problem was— just as it had been in Massachusetts some 150 years earlier—that the Indians’ unsettled lifestyles encouraged young warriors to conduct raiding expeditions on settler farms, which in turn provoked settler retaliation. Due to the superior technology, organization and numbers of the settlers, this kind of provocation almost always turned out badly for the Indians. (Page 241)

Washington therefore encouraged the purchase of farm equipment and spinning wheels for the Indians, and fostered policies that would teach them to live settled, agricultural lives. As the historian Mary Thompson put it: “Washington felt that as the cultures got closer together and got more alike, it would make them easier to live together.” (Page 241)

JEFFERSON THE PRAGMATIST (Page 242)

While many acknowledge that Washington was well-disposed toward the Indians, especially as president, others see in Jefferson a shrewd, calculating man who said nice things in public but was anti-Indian in private. (Page 242)

Like Franklin and Washington, Jefferson knew that the Indians were long since dependent on the Americans for many of their “necessities.” He was also correct in judging that they were going to have to settle down sooner or later, not only because of their own desire to use European-manufactured items but simply because game was disappearing—largely through their own use of ﬁrearms. Jefferson was also at pains to ensure that US government agents, rather than private speculators, supplied the Indians and bought their excess land, because as Jefferson said, this could be done by the US government without proﬁteering. This would provide the maximum price to the Indians for their land, while charging them the minimum price for the necessities they needed. (Page 243)

Jefferson repeatedly attempted to ensure that Indians would be left with more than enough land to make them prosperous as farmers. He only intended to purchase for the United States the land that the Indians, in their unavoidable transition to a farming people, could have no hope of making use of. On numerous occasions Jefferson revealed his intention to set up every friendly and cooperative Indian household with enough land to make them ﬁnancially independent— indeed, much wealthier than the majority of European Americans of his time. His goal, in other words, was to leave Indian families at least as wealthy as the average American family, if not more so. As president, Jefferson wrote to the Cherokee Deputies in 1809, urging them to “make a law for giving to every head of a family a separate parcel of land, which, when he has built upon and improved, it shall belong to him and his descendants forever, and which the nation itself shall have no right to sell from under his feet.” (Page 244)

Jefferson endorses the idea that the southern Indians, who lived in the region of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi should be allowed to keep their lands within the United States and should not be removed. Many in the American elite agreed with Jefferson’s assessment that the southern Indians should be left in their places. Alas, Jefferson’s line of thought would not be sustained, and the (Page 245)

election of Andrew Jackson in 1829 turned American policy in favor of Indian removal. (Page 246)

THE HUMANITY AND BRAVERY OF LINCOLN (Page 246)

The background to the story is the Dakota War of 1862. At that time, the Civil War was going badly for the North and the government fell behind in making its prearranged welfare payments to the Dakota and other Indians in the west. At the same time, US government agents took advantage of the chaos to make massive proﬁts for themselves at the expense of various Indian tribes. A US commission of early 1862 found that the previous governor had enriched himself to the tune of roughly $100,000 in only four years, on a salary of $2,000. Clearly, much injustice had been done; at the same time, the desperate political situation was a primary reason why things had gotten so far out of hand so quickly. (Page 246)

Lincoln’s policy toward the Dakota was thus lenient and humane by most standards. It was also brave, because it put him directly at odds with public hysteria over the recent massacres. It shows no sign of “racism,” but treats Indian warriors with as much humanity as was later shown to Confederate POWs. Lincoln was well aware that his clemency would dispose many people against his government at a crucial period during the war, but he did it anyway. Such moral bravery in a politician should be celebrated, not condemned. (Page 247)

Could any of our activist historian friends have done better or been signiﬁcantly more humane when placed in the shoes of a Washington or Lincoln? The answer is: of course not. By any historical standards, the likes of Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and Lincoln continue to merit their exceptional reputations, and anyone who would question this on the grounds of an anti-Indian prejudice is blinded by ideological animus and impervious to evidence. (Page 248)

CHAPTER 15 WAS THE TRAIL OF TEARS GENOCIDAL? (Page 249)

T he Trail of Tears is a label for the policy of Indian removal inaugurated by President Andrew Jackson in 1830 and continued by Jackson’s second vice president and successor, Martin Van Buren. The main groups affected were the Five Civilized Tribes of southern Indians, who had been granted lands in the modern US states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and neighboring areas. (Page 249)

sixty thousand Indians were removed from these areas to the new “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma. (Page 250)

These removals were for the most part direct violations of earlier treaties made with the Indians. Even the US Supreme Court declared them illegal. They were instigated after gold was discovered in North Carolina and Georgia, which put massive political pressure on state authorities to allow encroachment on Indian land. (Page 250)

This was particularly unfortunate, because the various southern Indian tribes had for several decades settled in to do precisely what the likes of Washington and Jefferson had hoped for: to farm, to own property, to become businesspeople, and generally to assimilate into the American lifestyle of the time, while maintaining distinctive ways of their own. All of these tribes had lived in their territories for a generation or more as independent nations within the United States; the communities that were ripped apart by the relocation were vibrant and beginning to thrive. (Page 250)

No matter how you slice it, however, the removal was grossly unfair, and the way it was enforced was cruel and capricious. (Page 250)

Once the Indians got to Oklahoma, the chaotic nature of the relocations meant that border disputes ﬂared up among various tribes and factions. This resulted in a series of high-proﬁle murders and internecine conﬂicts. The entire affair remains one of the darkest stains in the entire history of US-Indian relations. That said, the events in question have been signiﬁcantly distorted and misrepresented for political effect. (Page 251)

the death toll was relatively low for such a forced march, (Page 251)

three thousand people, which amounted to some 5 percent of the total population. Most of these unfortunate souls died of cold, exposure, and disease, which were exacerbated by the fact that some marches were cruelly conducted by soldiers during the winter months. (Page 251)

To paint “America” as uniformly bad due to the Trail of Tears, given that substantial numbers of Americans did indeed ﬁght against the Trail of Tears policy, is to engage in propaganda rather than history. (Page 252)

DIVISION AMONG THE INDIANS (Page 252)

The leadership had known that this was coming for years, if not decades, before it actually happened, and many offers and counteroffers were made before any soldiers actually showed up at someone’s door. Many Indian leaders had been educated outside the tribal areas, and many believed (as had Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson) that the eventual removal of the Indians was inevitable, considering the tremendous economic and demographic pressure that was being put on a few thousand Indians by hundreds of thousands of covetous white settlers. (Page 252)

The divisions over Indian removal were only one facet of a major debate that had been going on in Indian society for the better part of one hundred years. Just like their American counterparts, most tribal leaders by the end of the eighteenth century were aware that their way of life was disappearing, that they had voluntarily become economically dependent on the whites, and that the advance of writing and education was changing their culture irreversibly. The sheer numbers of whites versus Indians meant that by the early nineteenth century many were already part white—what in Mexico would be called mestizo and in Canada métis. (Page 253)

Americanization of their culture. (Page 253)

Treaty of New Echota, (Page 254)

For all its generosity, this treaty did come at the expense of the Cherokees’ ancestral lands in Georgia. It was by any civilized standard illegal and unfair for Jackson to force the Cherokees to move. The Treaty of New Echota aroused the ire of Jackson’s opponents including, as we will see, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was also opposed by a traditionalist faction of Cherokee led by Chief John Ross. (Page 255)

MASS RESISTANCE TO JACKSON’S POLICIES (Page 255)

Sensationalists who wish to view the Trail of Tears as a sign of longstanding genocidal intent on the part of colonists neglect to point out one signiﬁcant fact: the decision by President Jackson to remove the southern Native Americans beyond the Mississippi was hugely controversial. (Page 255)

Pretty much everything you need to know about the extent of contemporary opposition to the Trail of Tears is present in this summary. Hershberger implies that women were opposed to the Indian removals while men were generally complicit. But her own write-up betrays this misleading conclusion. According to Jackson’s second vice president, Martin Van Buren, the policy had stirred up such a hornet’s nest of opposition that the US government felt (Page 256)

THE TRAIL OF TEARS: A BALANCED READING (Page 257)

Then as now, almost everyone agrees that the Trail of Tears was one of the more tragic and dishonorable events ever engaged in by the United States government. That being said, it remains true that the Indian-removal policy was opposed by a great many members of the US Congress, by members of the American intelligentsia, by millions of private citizens, and even by the US Supreme Court. The treaties and offers that preceded the removal contained a number of stipulations that are much more generous than they might have been. (Page 257)

A 95 percent survival rate hardly counts as genocide, especially when most of these deaths were indeed situational rather than premeditated. People who are (Page 257)

given a choice to become farmers and US citizens but who then choose to be relocated to Oklahoma on principle can likewise hardly be called victims of genocide. (Page 258)

The more one learns about the Indian leaders of this time, the more one realizes that most had long interpersonal histories with the American elite. This was hardly the one-sided, us-vs-them affair that most modern journalistic accounts make it out to be. Major Ridge fought alongside Andrew Jackson as his ally in more than one military campaign. Ridge’s own son was educated in Connecticut. Most of the Cherokee leadership was part European. And everyone involved knew what was at stake for years before it happened—there was a long, drawn-out political process, which helped to ensure that traditionalists like Ross would be pitted against assimilationists like Ridge. (Page 258)

This is not to say that Jackson, Van Buren, and their supporters do not bear a heavy responsibility and that it was not a serious tragedy. Martin Van Buren recognized his error, at least in later years, and he was big enough to admit that he had been egregiously wrong (Page 258)

CHAPTER 16 DID EUROPEANS STARVE, MASSACRE, OR SPREAD DISEASE AMONG THE NATIVES? (Page 259)

Modern-day commentators portray the Wounded Knee Massacre as just another slaughter of helpless Indians by racist United States troops. But the numbers of US dead remind us that the situation on the ground was often more ﬂuid than we like to think. This is true even during the later decades of the nineteenth century, when the Indians were usually outnumbered and outgunned. The high number of US casualties at Wounded Knee suggest that many soldiers had waded into the group of Lakota warriors expecting there to be no resistance—just like hundreds of similar actions that had taken place across the west in previous decades. (Page 260)

War casualties therefore made up a small minority—usually less than 5 percent—of the “deaths” that are routinely cited. (Page 261)

Indian casualties in the mid-nineteenth century included a great number of men, women, and children who were massacred at the hands of rival tribes. (Page 261)

The squeeze that many tribes felt with the arrival of large numbers of whites after 1850 often served to intensify traditional rivalries, as hunting grounds and food supplies were threatened. This led to an increased casualty count, at a time when Amerindian tribes could least afford to suffer population decline. The result was a downward population spiral that reached a nadir of perhaps two hundred and seventy thousand Indians by the turn of the twentieth century. (Page 262)

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY (Page 262)

The ﬁfty years from 1830 to 1880 constituted a decisive and turbulent era in the history of US-Indian relations. This brief period saw the great majority of US land ﬂip from Indian to settler proprietorship. The population of the United States was about thirty million and growing every year, while the Indian population was perhaps three hundred thousand. In other words, whites outnumbered Indians by one hundred to one. About half of these Indians were already settled on reservations, making the proportion of settlers to “wild” Indians even more disproportionate. Apart from Oklahoma, California contained the greatest numbers of Indians in 1850. The numbers of Indians roaming the Plains ﬂuctuated in the few tens of thousands, a tiny population that was spread among a dozen or more large US states. That said, they occupied territories that were increasingly coveted by farmers and ranchers, as the value of property continued to increase. (Page 262)

The frontier remained dangerous throughout this time period, and Indians were frequently the aggressors. This led to dozens of massacres of European Americans by Indians that often get overlooked. We can count the Indian Creek massacre of 1832, in (Page 262)

which ﬁfteen settlers were massacred by Potawatomi Indians; the Fort Parker Massacre of 1836, in which seven European Americans were killed by Comanche; the Killough Massacre of 1838, in which eighteen settlers were killed by a party of Cherokee; the Webster Massacre of 1839, in which ten settlers were killed by a party of Comanche; the death of twenty-three settlers at the hands of the Comanche during the Linnville Raid of 1840; and so forth. This steady litany of outrages at the hands of Indian bands goes far to explain why the American public had little sympathy for independent Indian bands during these decades. (Page 263)

As the nineteenth century wore on, the tide turned rapidly against the Indians. By the 1850s we ﬁnd increasing numbers of massacres in which dozens or even a few hundred Indians were killed by whites at one time. California, as we will see in the next chapter, saw the worst of this action. (Page 263)

The main factor that “doomed” the western Indians of these decades—just as it doomed the buffalo—was the rapid advance of Western technology on the heels of the Industrial Revolution. (Page 263)

After 1830, the rapid advance of canals and railroads brought a huge inﬂux of European Americans to the Mississippi and beyond. (Page 264)

The ﬁrst transcontinental telegraph was completed by Western Union already in 1861, meaning that news could now be relayed rapidly from virtually any point in the United States. (Page 264)

to United States troops, who could report The telegraph and the railroad gave an enormous logistical advantage Indian movements and move supplies with a much greater rapidity than ever before. Such circumstances rapidly closed the circle on the remaining politically independent Indians, making their sphere of operations dramatically smaller in only a few short decades—a much faster time scale than envisioned by Jefferson only a few decades before. (Page 264)

POISONED BLANKETS: THE SMALLPOX MYTH (Page 264)

certainly the case that Europeans carried unknown diseases to which the Indians were vulnerable. Typhoid, measles, ﬂu, and other diseases were all unknown to the New World before European contact—although it also worked the other way, as in the case of syphilis, a virulent infection that was almost certainly brought back to Europe by Columbus’s crew, spreading across the continent with devastating effects (Page 265)

The worst of the Old World diseases was smallpox, which ravaged settlers and Indians alike. As we will see, smallpox among the Indigenous population of the Americas was a major cause for government concern throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the Enlightenment and the Scientiﬁc Revolution advanced across the West, ofﬁcials in some countries gained a greater awareness of the spread of smallpox, the numbers of cases involved, and also the potential to treat diseases through various types of inoculation. What we ﬁnd is a longstanding concern for (Page 265)

Native victims of smallpox that gives the lie to narratives of “genocide.” (Page 266)

The archival research of hundreds of historians has only turned up a handful of instances where Europeans may have spread smallpox as a form of biological warfare—and all of these are inconclusive. (Page 266)

The most notorious is the alleged gift of smallpox-infected blankets to Natives in the area of Fort Pitt during the French and Indian War. In letters between General Sir Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet, Amherst suggested that Bouquet take advantage of an outbreak of smallpox in the area to attempt to infect the local Indians. Bouquet for his part agreed that he would look into the possibility, though he admitted to Amherst that he was afraid lest he get smallpox himself. Biological warfare, then as now, carried with it the distinct possibility of killing friend and foe indiscriminately. (Page 266)

While evidence for Europeans spreading disease among the Indians is almost nonexistent, there is, on the ﬂip side, ample evidence that Europeans went out of their way to inoculate Indians against smallpox as soon as a vaccine became available. (Page 266)

In Mexico and Latin America, a terrible smallpox epidemic of 1797 threatened millions of Native people, and it is reported that some sixty to seventy thousand Indians were induced to undergo variolation, supposedly with good success. However, many Indians continued to resist these efforts, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands. (Page 267)

Thomas Jefferson, for his part, used the smallpox vaccine on his own children and the rest of his household, including his several hundred slaves. Soon afterwards, he became the ﬁrst person to introduce smallpox vaccine to the Amerindians. He convinced a great delegation of warriors, who were staying in Washington DC in the winter of 1801–02, to get vaccinated, and the program was a success. He thereupon encouraged the chiefs to spread the news of the vaccine inoculate to themselves. their people, hoping induce them to to (Page 267)

In 1803, Jefferson sent some smallpox vaccine along with the explorers Lewis and Clark. He gave them instructions to vaccinate as many people as possible and to encourage the Indians to accept vaccination as soon it became available. (Page 267)

De Balmis claims to have vaccinated ﬁfty thousand Indians in Peru alone. The reason this could be done so rapidly compared with the US was that the Spanish practiced “arm to arm” vaccination, where a few vaccinated people were used as human incubators. (Page 268)

After a false start under President Monroe in the 1810s, the US government under President Jackson began to fund an Indian vaccination program in 1832. Yes, the same president who is viliﬁed for the Trail of Tears was the one who authorized the ﬁrst federally (Page 268)

funded mass vaccination program for the purpose of saving the Indians from their greatest scourge. (Page 269)

The cold, hard fact is that the US government’s long-term, widespread vaccine policy saved a substantial portion of all American Indians in the nineteenth-century United States. People lament the fact that the Indian population dipped below a few hundred thousand by 1900, but it might easily have dipped far lower, had the federal government not intervened to provide medicine, food, and other material support to the remaining Indians. It is indisputable that the US government’s vaccination policy saved far more Indians than were massacred during the entire nineteenth century, including in California. (Page 270)

THE OREGON TRAIL (Page 270)

THE CIVIL WAR AND THE LONG WALK (Page 271)

In “Indian Territory” (Oklahoma), the majority of tribes actually sided with the Confederacy, because a minority of wealthy and inﬂuential Indians owned African slaves and did not wish to give them up. (Page 271)

Many Native Americans enlisted with both the Confederate and Union armies during the Civil War. This was due to the fact that many Native Americans were already skilled warriors and also because the armies would issue regular paychecks. As a result, it is estimated that no fewer than ten thousand Amerindians—a signiﬁcant portion of the total Native population—enlisted as ofﬁcers or soldiers during the war. About two-thirds of these fought for the Confederacy. (Page 271)

What these and other write-ups downplay is the fact that New Mexico at the time of the Long Walk was rife with Confederate sympathizers, many of whom were actively attempting to enlist the Navajo to their side. The Navajo of this time were not harmless, as it happens, but rather a band of armed warriors keen to maintain their political independence. They had to be dangerous, because they were continually under threat from Mexican raiders and enemy tribes such as the Apache. (Page 272)

Carson was given responsibility for protecting the Ute, Apache, and Pueblo Indians in his territory. One of the major problems he faced was the ongoing war between the Utes and the Apaches, and the fact that the Apaches had been responsible for a series of attacks on their Indigenous neighbors as well as nearby white settlers. In 1854 the superintendent of Indian Affairs wrote of the Apaches that “no other Indians has committed an equal amount of single band of depredations upon, and caused so much trouble and annoyance to the people [both Indigenous and white] of this Territory.” He concluded, “whenever there is any mischief brewing, invariably the Apaches have a hand in it.” (Page 273)

Carson believed that the only realistic policy by the 1850s was for Indians to be removed to areas remote from white settlement—i.e., onto reservations. He also repeats the old truth that Indians would have to be enticed to settle down and farm if they were not to starve, since game was becoming increasingly scarce. (Page 273)

Another part of Carson’s job was to dole out US-mandated supplies to the Indians under his protection. This was part of an ongoing policy to prevent them from starving, although the logic behind it was not entirely altruistic. Experience showed that hungry Indians were more likely to conduct raids. Having no administrative headquarters, and forced to range around his enormous territory, Carson would often come upon bands of Indians who were “in a very deplorable state.” He would provide as many supplies as he could, though the US government’s Indian relief efforts were notoriously underfunded— especially during the Civil War. As Carson put it, “if the government will not do something for them to save them from starving, they will be obliged to Steal.” (Page 274)

THE COMING OF THE RESERVATIONS (Page 275)

Participation in the property market, which still forms the basis of many American Indian households today, can hardly be considered a great evil. During the 1820s and ’30s, a popular mentality in the United States favored the removal of large groups of Indians farther west, opening land to European American settlement. We have also seen how this mentality was not universal and how it was bitterly opposed by many Americans. (Page 275)

Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 was passed with the aim of providing places for various western tribes to settle. (Page 276)

Indians to protect the act were The goals of from white encroachment, to reserve some Indian land, which would remain legally out of the reach of American land claims, and also to protect European Americans from Indian aggression. It was also hoped that the reservation system would encourage Indian groups to settle down and farm. By 1871, an additional appropriations act had been signed, which ceased to recognize Amerindian tribes as independent political units. (Page 276)

Many US government ofﬁcials were openly anti-Indian, but many were not. Prominent ﬁgures such as President Grant sympathized with the Indians and did everything they could to ensure an equitable peace. (Page 276)

Left-leaning critics of the reservation system are philosophically at odds with the notion that welfare payments discourage human capital formation. Right-leaning critics meanwhile argue that handouts create a moral hazard that rewards an unproductive lifestyle. They argue that this is why problems such as alcoholism, drug use, and violence have remained endemic in many tribal areas today, while Left-leaning critics invariably blame “racism” or some other systemic wrong— anyone but the alcoholics themselves. The Dawes Act reformers were certainly heavy-handed; but to assume that their arguments had no validity, is to assume that one side of a live political debate is correct while the other side’s arguments have zero merit. It’s not a very sophisticated point of view. (Page 277)

By 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt had gotten an Indian New Deal passed, whose centerpiece was the “Indian Reorganization Act.” The purpose of the Indian New Deal was to reconstitute viable land bases for remaining Indian tribes, with the express purpose of encouraging them to preserve something of their traditional cultures. Things had now come full circle: an American public that used to fear Indians for their violence or despise them for apparent poverty was now—in hindsight—ready to appreciate Indian cultures for the richness these provided to the American experience. (Page 278)

THE SLAUGHTER OF THE BUFFALO (Page 278)

According to Andrew C. Isenberg, author of The Destruction of the Bison (2000), it is possible that there were forty million buffalo roaming across the Great Plains of the United States in the year 1800. By 1900, less than one thousand were left. Most of these were slaughtered during the early 1870s, in the space of only a few years. (Page 278)

In terms of sheer biomass, it is probably the most substantial and rapid massacre of megafauna ever to occur in global history. (Page 279)

Only about 10 percent of all American Indians in 1870 actually lived off the buffalo, so the idea that killing the buffalo would starve the majority of Indians is wide of the mark from the outset. (Page 280)

The driving force behind the disappearance of the buffalo is the same that drove the near-extinction of African megafauna during the decades around 1900. Namely, the advance of ﬁrearms technology during the Second Industrial Revolution. A major turning point came in the 1860s with the introduction of breech-loaded repeating riﬂes. These could ﬁre much more accurately and frequently than the olderstyle muzzle-loading weapons that were still in use during the US Civil War. From 1873 the Winchester riﬂe was mass-produced to the extent that it became the staple ﬁrearm of the west. Improvements in cartridges also enabled the classic six-shooter revolver to be introduced. (Page 281)

Between 1872 and 1874, more than one million buffalo were killed by white hunters per year. The Indians were also quick to take advantage of the new ﬁrearms technology; so, despite their much smaller numbers, they are believed to have killed fully one-quarter as many buffalo as the white hunters. Indian culling of buffalo during these years was therefore not negligible, and it’s difﬁcult to reconcile this with ideas of Indian environmentalism. Even if buffalo hunting by whites had been made illegal, it is questionable whether the great buffalo herds could have survived the more efﬁcient killing of them by Indians themselves using the new repeating riﬂes. And around the globe, including Africa and Asia, the new ﬁrearms initiated a precipitous decline in megafauna populations. (Page 282)

many states and territories in the High Plains had already begun to restrict hunting during the 1850s and ’60s, even before the buffalo trade went into high gear. However, the buffalo slaughter rose so meteorically after 1871 that by the time most government agencies could act, much of the damage had been done. (Page 282)

In sum, Americans have been taught to believe that the mass slaughter of buffalo in the 1870s was the result of a deliberate US policy aimed at starving the remaining American Indians to death. In fact, the US government proved that if anything it was determined to stop the buffalo slaughter, or at least render it more sustainable. Congress even passed a law prohibiting the slaughter, in a timely enough fashion that it might have made some difference. Political wrangling saw the law get vetoed and rendered ineffective, but this was not for lack of political will by the majority of US legislators. In addition, only a tiny proportion of surviving Indians lived off buffalo hunting in the 1870s—perhaps 10 percent of all surviving Indians. (Page 283)

CHAPTER 17 DID THE GOLD RUSH TRIGGER AN INDIAN GENOCIDE? (Page 284)

SPANISH AND MEXICAN OPPRESSION (Page 285)

A RETURN TO NUANCE (Page 286)

All told, the worst period of violence in California lasted less than twenty years. Much of the stage for this abuse was set by the Mexican government’s secularization of the mission system and the indentured labor system that it created. Many of those who bought, in this period were part-Indigenous sold, and abused Indians Mexicans. Undoubtedly, it was a time of sorrow for many California Indians, and it was one of the most shameful episodes in the entirety of American history. But other forces besides racism and white supremacy were at work. By the time the United States government got more control of the situation in the 1870s and ’80s, most of the violence was over, and an era of consolidation and coexistence could begin. (Page 286)

The idea that the ﬁrst Thanksgiving is a cause for shame and mourning is likewise demonstrably false. Narratives that claim otherwise are guilty of deliberate misreading of the meager sources for early New England history. Most of the history of early New England was surprisingly peaceful; most of the time, both Indian and New England authorities managed to keep violence from boiling over. Indian desire to trade with Europeans was extensive and drove much of this interaction. Most of the time, the colonists did not steal or cheat the Indians out of their land. The standard way to acquire land from the Indians was therefore to purchase it from them; this was done in almost every instance east of the Appalachians that was not occasioned by the outbreak of war. Indians for their part were not naive or gullible (Page 287)

dupes; they were well able to understand the nature of these transactions and usually able to drive a good bargain. (Page 288)

IV CONTEMPORARY ISSUES (Page 289)

CHAPTER 18 DID EUROPEANS COMMIT CULTURAL GENOCIDE? (Page 290)

B etween roughly 1860 and 1996, about one hundred and ﬁfty thousand Indigenous children across Canada were taken from their families and sent to what were known as “residential schools.” The stated goal of this system was to provide a basic education for Canadian Indigenous children, which would put them on a par with the rest of Canadian children. The creation of the residential school system was part of a late nineteenth-century vogue for creating public school systems, which spread across the developed world. These systems formed the basis of the public education system that is standard in most countries across the globe today (Page 290)

MASS HYSTERIA VS. HISTORICAL REALITY (Page 291)

The case of the Canadian residential school system shows that mass hysteria is alive and well in the twenty-ﬁrst century. A few years ago, we believed that this sort of thing belonged to the seventeenthcentury era of the Salem witch trials, or at least to totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany and Maoist China. We now know that modern Western countries remain just as susceptible to versions of mass psychosis as any historical society. Most of us are aware that the internet has created a new golden age the spread of disinformation, but as of now, there seems precious little anyone can do about it that would not do more harm than good. for (Page 291)

(usually The idea behind cultural genocide is that a dominant group (usually Europeans) intentionally tries to snuff out the culture of a “subaltern” group Indigenous people). The Canadian Historical Association alleges that most of this cultural genocide took place from the 1870s onwards, when the Canadian government decreed that Indigenous children would have to go to public school. As this was the Victorian era, these schools were often strict, suffused with Christian messages, and served as hothouses for the spread of disease. Children therefore died at the schools in what we would today consider shocking and tragic numbers, just like they did at every boarding school during that time period. (Page 292)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIGENOUS EDUCATION (Page 293)

Thankfully for today’s hundreds of millions of descendants of historical Indians, Europeans did not set up an educational apartheid system, where they attempted to shelter Indigenous people from the knowledge that Europeans had inherited from previous civilizations. Instead, they made thousands of attempts across the centuries, usually stemming from humanitarian impulses, to help Indians improve their lives and their communities through education. (Page 294)

WAS IT GENOCIDE? (Page 295)

To call the education of Indigenous children “cultural genocide” is to ignore the complex history of cultural interaction that had often been occurring long before any formal educational regimes were set up in a given region. Throughout the history of European settlement in America, many Europeans dedicated their lives to the education of Indigenous children, because they believed fundamentally in the value of education to empower and transform Indigenous lives, and to help them become productive members of the global community. Modern-day activists will call this shortsighted, and in various ways it undoubtedly was. But overall, one would be hard-pressed to argue that the average experience of Indian children in Western-style schools made them worse off in the long run. To pretend that the entire school system was fundamentally a bad idea is not only to to misunderstand misconstrue or ignore the universally proven power of education itself. these historical people’s motives but also (Page 295)

CHAPTER 19 IS USING NATIVE AMERICAN NAMES “CULTURAL APPROPRIATION”? (Page 296)

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN MEXICO (Page 297)

The ethnic mix of Mexicans today adds further difﬁculty to the problem of determining who is “dominant” or not. Since the majority of Mexicans are mestizos, it makes good sense for them to celebrate a hybrid holiday such as the Day of the Dead. Meanwhile, Indigenous Mexicans living separately sometimes preserve elements of their own culture that are more local and not nationally celebrated like the Day of the Dead. Furthermore, there are fully European Mexicans and mestizos who might choose to celebrate the Day of the Dead because it is something their community does—or they might not. (Page 298)

WHO INVENTED CULTURAL APPROPRIATION? (Page 298)

Postcolonial theory is based on the (originally Marxist) idea that society neatly divides into camps of oppressed and oppressor. As we have seen, critical theory believes a priori that “the system” is predicated on the oppression of a minority by a dominant group. It therefore assumes that any cultural action by the dominant group must further the oppression of the minority. (Page 299)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIAN REPRESENTATION IN AMERICA (Page 300)

A couple of points stand out. First, Longacre (correctly) believed that the feathered headdress was common across large parts of the United States—not only in a few tribes as is often claimed today. Feathered headdresses can be found not only across North America proper, but they were also integral parts of Aztec and Incan iconography as well. Secondly, Longacre intentionally rejected European symbolism (the Phrygian cap) as being inappropriate to the New World. He wanted to see Indigenous culture represented in mainstream America—precisely what many of today’s activists accuse European Americans of failing to do. Thirdly, Longacre meant the coin to immortalize the perpetual independence and freedom of the Indians, which could even be read as a pro-Native political statement. (Page 301)

THE ERASURE OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN? (Page 302)

CHAPTER 20 ARE NATIVES OWED REPARATIONS? (Page 303)

The weaponization of history by identity activists stands to gain a handful of people trillions of dollars’ worth of capital to the detriment of nearly everyone else.143 Before irreversible harm is done to the public purse, it behooves us to look at the history of Indian reparations, and the possible repercussions of ceding land and political power to individual tribes. (Page 304)

REPARATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES (Page 304)

Native Americans make up about 1.5 percent of the American population, though the borders of this population are very fuzzy due to questions of tribal membership and the prevalence of mixed heritage. Members of this 1.5 percent are about twice as likely to live in poverty as the average North American household.144 Fertility rates are high, as is often the case with impoverished and under-educated households. Whereas about 80 percent of adult Americans possess a high school diploma, only about 70 percent of Amerindians do. While about 25 percent of Americans hold a bachelor’s degree, only about 11.5 percent of Native Americans do so. The education gap also turns into an employment gap; Amerindian households experience more than double the national unemployment rate on average, while in some reservation communities incidence of unemployment is as high as 35 percent. (Page 304)

Reparations and support for the Indians began in the seventeenth century, when hundreds of churches and charitable groups set up foundations to provide food, clothing, shelter, education, legal representation, and political sovereignty to Native Americans. This represents a massive outpouring of resources and goodwill—the extension of a massive pro-Indian safety net by the so-called colonizers—which today goes almost entirely unrecognized. We have seen hints of this in the numerous schools and charities that were set up in every US colony and state, wherever Indians could be found. We have seen further hints in the efforts of missionaries and intellectuals to sway public opinion against the Indian removal policy of the 1830s through the 1850s. (Page 305)

Meanwhile the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs was created in 1824 with the purpose of protecting the Indians from settler encroachment and helping them to achieve peace and prosperity. Though there are many reasons to view this mandate cynically, the bureau nonetheless did a lot of good as its role continued to expand, and it continues to be a positive presence in the lives of many Amerindians today. (Page 305)

The Dawes Act of 1887 has already been mentioned in a previous chapter. It saw the creation and codiﬁcation of additional annual payments in cash and kind. Many tribes were already receiving regular annuities from the US government decades prior to this. This has led some to observe that Native Americans were the ﬁrst (Page 306)

Americans to receive regular welfare payments—some sixty years before the New Deal guaranteed basic stipends to every American citizen. (Page 307)

On the ﬂip side, those who live on reservations often do not own their own land or even their own houses. This renders many of them perpetual renters, with all the incentives to neglect property that this entails. Many have theorized that this “enslavement through welfare” at the national, state, and tribal level is to blame for persistently high levels of poverty, alcoholism, mental illness, and other social issues detailed above. (Page 308)

CONCLUSION NOT STOLEN: TOWARD A BALANCED HISTORY OF EUROPEAN COLONIZATION (Page 309)

The arrival of the Spanish caused a massive demographic collapse in the population centers of the New World, particularly in greater Mexico and greater Peru. A century later, the arrival of the French and the English caused similar population collapses on the East Coast of North America, which gradually spread west across the continent. The Spanish administration of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands proved an unmitigated disaster for the Indians of the region, as these were subjected to forced labor, forced relocation, wanton cruelty, and even enslavement at the hands of ill-governed adventurers. The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas was a civilizational disaster that permanently derailed the autonomous development of New World culture. In the Spanish conquest of Mexico, easily one hundred thousand people died from the direct consequences of war and the real number might have been double or triple this amount. (Page 309)

Continuous encroachment and occasional bad behavior sparked periodic conﬂicts with the Indians, conﬂicts that might result in a massacre of settlers but that usually turned out worse for the Indians. While colonial governments attempted to maintain a separation of the two peoples and a political status quo, in the longer run the simple fact of overwhelming colonial population meant that the Indians were inexorably pushed over the Appalachians. In the south, the US government signed treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes, while in the north and west, the Iroquois and other tribes were slowly driven before the encroaching settlement by a process of squatting, land purchases, and occasional open warfare. (Page 310)

The discovery of gold in North Carolina and Georgia in the 1820s put tremendous pressure on the southern governments to “remove” the Indians across the Mississippi, where for a generation it was naively believed they would ﬁnd a permanent home. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1830 saw the triumph of the Indian-removal party, which precipitated the series of forced migrations on the southern tribes that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. Meanwhile, the purchase of greater Louisiana in 1803 sped up the Americanization of the greater Mississippi River basin. The rapid advance of technology led to massive overland migrations in the 1840s and ’50s, which now began to reach the US West Coast, meaning that the remaining Indian population was isolated, and continually harassed by settlers and soldiers alike. increasingly surrounded, (Page 310)

This is hardly a glorious track record, and there is much about it to lament. That being said, we have sought to demonstrate that there are virtually no grounds—at any time in the ﬁve-hundred-year history of European settlement in the New World—for declaring European policies or actions against the Amerindians to be “genocidal.” This is —at best—a metaphor; at worst an inexcusable exaggeration that diminishes the victims of actual genocide. Nor is there historical justiﬁcation for arguing that the United States or any Western Hemisphere country is fundamentally illegitimate on the grounds that it was “stolen” from Indigenous peoples. Even if some land was stolen or conquered in war, a great deal of it was purchased and sold (Page 311)

voluntarily. Such a simplistic view also ignores inescapable realities such as demographic reality and the necessity of switching from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle after the introduction of ﬁrearms. (Page 312)

Looking at global history as a whole, it is abundantly clear that Europeans were no more prone to violence, hierarchy, patriarchy, or slavery than any other people on Earth (Page 312)