I’ve seen this map making the rounds on social media lately, always used to highlight all the treaties with Indigenous people that the United States did, in fact, brazenly break.

I do not dispute the map’s accuracy. I presume it is all true, but if one knows anything about Indigenous American history, and I do, one sees more than just the rapacious American appetite for land and the condescension most Americans had for indigenous people until things started to change right around the time of Custer.

One sees widespread Indigenous complicity with the settlers. For starters, look at the “Ceded Lands.” This territory was ceded to the United States, by treaty, by Indigenous nations. Often, the land ceded was not the land upon which that particular Indigenous nation was living at the time—it quite often belonged to another one, which is why they ceded it.

You don’t see the Lenape, the Erie, the Penobscot, the Pequot, the Shawnee, or the Pueblo on this map at all. The Pueblo had been established along the Rio Grande in New Mexico for centuries, and still are, but most of their land is shown as belonging to Apache or Comanche, Arapahoe or Cheyenne, or “ceded.” Why?

Because the US were promising those Indigenous nations Pueblo land in exchange for leaving settlers farther east alone. This same pattern is all over the place.

In New York, the Iroquois fought for the English against both other Indigenous nations, and the French, to be promised all that land. Note where the Sioux are. They began around the southern shores of Lake Michigan, and were given guns by the US Cavalry, which they used to move west and displace the Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan even farther west, as the map indicates.

The Crow made it a point to never directly challenge the Americans on any large scale. In fact, they went out of their way not to kill them, though they would steal their horses. When asked why by an American in the 1820s, a Crow leader laughed and said “Because if we kill you, then you can’t come by again, and we could not steal horses from you again.”

I also laughed when I learned that little anecdote.

The Crow served as scouts for the Cavalry for generations, and they are still with us, so don’t fault them. In the United States, Indigenous survival alone is an accomplishment worthy of respect.

Could Indigenous Americans have withstood the onslaught of European settlers and technologies and preserved an independent nation of their own? The hard, cold answer is a definite Yes, but Indigenous people would have had to do two things that many of them could not even conceive of doing at the time.

First, they had to stop raiding against each other and unite against the whites. Tecumseh knew this. Second, they had to learn how to manufacture their own firearms. Tecumseh probably suspected this, and the Japanese saw the point as soon as they learned what was happening on the American frontier.

In order to do both of these things, Indigenous people would have had to completely give up the only way of life that they knew. They did not want to become the kind of people who lived as the whites did, and they chose to die or to be forced onto reservations rather than choose to give up what they were.

I understand and respect that choice. I can even admire it.

The Japanese chose to totally transform their society in order to fend off conquest and colonization. They industrialized. They learned, copied, and improved upon what the Europeans and Americans were willing to teach or trade with them.

They traded one way of life for another in order to preserve their independence and most of their culture, and they did succeed, though at a terrible price, both for themselves and their neighbors.

At least, I think the horrors of the Japanese Empire and its downfall was a terrible price. Was it worth it? That’s not for me to judge. It happened, but I can understand and even admire the choice the Japanese made as well.

Indigenous Americans lost both their way of life and their independence, but they are American citizens, they still have some of their lands, their old way of life is now something celebrated and honored, and they definitely deserve some significant reparations and total control over the land they do legally own, just for starters.

That does not mean the complicity of their ancestors with first European and then American expansion and settlement should be ignored, any more than I should ignore the actions of my own. It happened, history would have been very different had it not happened, and it’s as unpleasant for some Indigenous people to contemplate as it is for me to know that I am a direct descendant of one of George Washington’s Burners of Villages.

In order to really understand why people in the past thought the way they did, one must suspend one’s own contemporary moral compass and forego the mental masturbatory joys of thinking “Oh, I’m a much better person than those people, I would never have done such things,” and look at the material conditions they lived in and understand what passed as common knowledge and common sense at the time.

Now, most of us see things very differently from how our ancestors did. None of us are them, and none of us are bound to follow the same patterns as they. But in order to break them, one must understand why they behaved as they did in the first place, and labeling one group as “good” and the other as “evil” accomplishes absolutely nothing on that score.

Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

Share

If you appreciate my scribbling, and can tolerate more emails, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at the lowest rates on Substack. You can also buy me a beer and receive no emails at all. Shares and likes mean much.

Buy me a Beer