The removal, relocation—and yes, the slaughter—of indigenous peoples and their subsequent “settlement” onto reservation lands is yet another “American story” that few want to recollect and fewer still want to deal with.
Over three centuries and to this very day expendability has been the operative word here—move the “savages” (so designated by generations of white religious and “civic” voices) out of the way for westward expansion and white settlement at any cost.
Mount up and massacre, sweep and destroy, push and punish. Put those who survive onto reservations, the early U.S. version of South Africa’s Bantustans that undergirded the brutal apartheid era. Nations with nation, with little standing and little power—the raw manifestation of Manifest Destiny that has characterized American identity as the nation swept westward across the continent, across the Pacific, and across the globe.
This is certainly not the America heralded in myth and song, nor the America acceptably known for its generosity of spirit and sacrifice. This is the deep underside of American identity shaped by an expansionist economic and political agenda that is more easily (and more comfortably) ignored than acknowledged, both then and now. As that well-armed agenda swept the coasts and plains, so it now sweeps the deserts of the Middle East; as the Calvary secured the Sioux so it secures the Sunni. Dick Cheney himself acknowledged as much in interviews this week, his cheeky, brazen responses to questions about the Iraq invasion and about his role in approving torture baring the withering wretchedness of his historic American roots.
Out of sight and out of mind, indigenous peoples and nations within the United States are seldom accorded identity as “Americans.” Treaties have been long ignored, disrespected, and overrun—witness the contemporary controversies and violence over fishing rights. Failed economies, non-existent jobs, unequal opportunities are hallmarks of federal neglect and apathy—witness the pervasive and chronic poverty on reservation communities. “Useless” lands once discarded for indigenous nationhood have since been coveted and sometimes taken for “the greater good” (of “Americans”). The list of offenses goes on and on…
As Barack Obama so eloquently reminds us, “we are not a red or blue America, but one America.” The journey to that political oneness, however, still stretches out into an uneasy future in a country historically and persistently characterized by that racial oneness that has wreaked havoc across the land, indeed leaving many who differ from the dominant culture as Americans indeed, but with reservations.