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Indeed, American public leaders emphatically insist on the uniqueness

of America based on its historical trajectory. But this view betrays a lack ofunderstanding about the very intense and prolonged traumas that shapedthe United States. The United States is the result of a special combina-tion of history and geography. Its founding cultural capital, with race andChristianity as the strongest components, was brought from Europe, andthis sense of various European pasts provided a starting point for identitybuilding. But the factor that made the critical departure from Europeanculture was Americas geography, inhabited by natives who were very dif-ferent from Europeans. It was the geographical disconnect from Europe,and hence separation from the European historical identities, that helpedform American character amidst clashes with various non-European civi-lizations. On the one hand Americans brought and retained their histori-cal identities of European pasts, which were amplified by mythmakers.On the other hand, the vulnerability and geographical isolation across theocean was intensified by encounters with the radically different cultures ofNative Americans. This tension between historical continuityandgeographi-cal discontinuitymutated the various European identities. Over time thesecoalesced into something uniquely American. White settlers believed thattheir destiny and authority to expand their land occupation was Godswill and grand plan for Earth. From the early 1600s until the late-1800s,the entire land mass of what is now called the United States was occupiedunder such a presumed mandate from God. Blacks were brought overfrom Africa and made into slaves in order to till the landand to fuel the

huge agrarian economy that created early Americas wealth. Gods civiliz-ing teleology was used as justification for horrendous acts.

Against this unique background, Americans produced a system of val-ues in order to perceive themselves as an extraordinary people. ManyAmerican historians have referred to this as American exceptionalism:Americas self-ordained right to step out of the restrictions of morality,ethics and even law that bound everyone else, and apply its own rules todeal with others. This exceptionalism was developed in the context ofthe Frontier, and depended on the characterization of Native Americanothers. The land mass that was the target of takeover at a given timebecame known as the Frontier; hence the Frontier was always expandingand shifting to new opportunities for takeover. All sorts of stories werereported and fabricated about what existed in this frontier.

Courageous men, called frontiersmen, who ventured forth brought backbounty along with exotic and heroic tales of the inhabitants there. Manyfrontiersmen saw the native inhabitants of America as savages. Defined inthis way, savages were dangerous and had to be captured and controlled.Even as the frontiersmen were violently subduing the natives, intellectu-als and policymakers debated whether the Native Americans could. Manybelieved that by converting them to Christianity they could accomplishthis task, while others asserted that the Native Americans could not achievesocial parity with the new settlers even if they became Christians.

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Once the land mass had been taken over, the Frontier was declared

closed by the Census Bureau after 1890 because there was no furtherland left. In 1893 historian Fredrick Jackson Turner advanced what wouldbecome known as The Turner Thesis, which said that every generationof Americans was more individualistic and democratic than the last becauseof its interaction with the Frontier. Then president Teddy Roosevelt, whowas well aware of Turners thesis, successfully convinced Americans thatthe Frontier had to expand overseas. Roosevelt oversaw a huge buildup inthe U.S. Navy, which led to the invasions of the Philippines and CentralAmerica. Manifest Destiny had gone globalas it continues to do tothis day. Thus the geopolitical events we are witnessing today are not ananomaly but are the continuation of a very old American trajectory.

The metaphor of the Frontier has sustained itself in the national cultureand is invoked in popular entertainment, advertising, political rhetoricand in Americans sense of being a uniquely exceptional people. Thiscollectivity of thought has been referred to in academic literature as theAmerican Myth of the Frontier. However, Turner and his followers(including politicians, academics, and artists) focused only on the positiveaspects of the Frontier in forming the American character and setting theUnited States on the road to becoming a superpower. Looking at Americafrom a different perspective, we can also identify the darker aspects of theMyth of the Frontier. We can see how the descriptions and justificationsthat first developed for dealing with Native American tribes have becomeso deeply entwined in the national Myth that they shape American poli-

cies to this day. Although the other has changed his location, his race,and his cultural identity, he may find his role in the American Myth to benot so different from the role played by Native Americans.

Besides being a physical place that shifted and expanded over time,the Frontier is also a mythic space. It represents that which is to beconquered/controlled, including such things as the Space Frontier, theScience Frontier, and the New Age Spiritual Frontier. Each of these hasits specialized frontiersmen who venture out as opportunistic adventurersin unchartered territory, to become hardcore experts at understandingthe mysterious wilderness waiting to be captured, and to return homeas heroes of American Civilization. This is the quintessential Americanentrepreneurial spirit that fuels its enormous creativity as a nation.

The Frontier is not only external but also internal, that is, located phys-ically inside the space controlled by Civilization. These internal frontiersare the threats from within that must be vigorously suppressed in order toprevent chaos. In the early days the American Pilgrims were very toughand unforgiving on policing discipline internally within their settlements.Subsequently the Black slaves became the internal threats. Later on theinternal frontiers consisted of Chinese laborers within America, the freedBlacks in the Jim Crow era, Asian immigrants, and Japanese internedduring World War II. Todays internal threats include gays, polygamists,Muslim Americans, illegal immigrants, among others.



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While the frontiersmen represent American Civilization, the others

(uncivilized/savages) consist of both those who are deemed harmlesslyexotic and others who are dangerous. These two kinds have been seen asnoble savages and dangerous savages, respectively. While the polyg-amists in Texas today might be benign and exotic noble savages, theoutspoken American Muslims are monitored as dangerous. Many insti-tutional mechanisms have evolved to support the frontiersmen in deal-ing with various kinds of savagesranging from co-opting the savagesto serve as functionaries of civilization, taming them into civilizedAmerican citizens, and containing them in prisons and shelters.

America evolves as these threats get assimilated and domesticated, orcontrolled and suppressed, or obliterated by genocide. Each such encoun-ter produces a new and upgraded version of American civilization. Thusthe early settlers called themselves English and referred to the savagesas Indians. But once the settlements also had non-English Europeans(i.e., Germans, etc.) the us became known as Christians and the otherside was called Heathens. Then came the era in which many NativeAmericans got converted to Christianity, so this Christian/Heathen dis-course was replaced by the notion of White/Non-White people. At firstonly Protestants were considered White, and the Irish had to resort toviolence to be allowed to join White labor unions. The book, How theIrish Became White,by Noel Ignatiev describes this process (Ignatiev 1996).Once the civic religion had expanded from Protestantism to includeCatholics as well, Jews were still left out, and they had to fight their way

into Whitenessas described in the book, How Jews Became White Folksand what that says about Race in America, by Karen Brodkin (Brodkin 1999).Each frontier encounter has thus expanded not only the physical territorybut also amended the Myth to include more people as insiders.

This article, however, shall focus primarily on the early formation of theFrontier Myth in encounters with Native Americans, and then summarizeat the end the implications as the Frontier continued to expand further.

Myth of Savages and Heroic Frontiersmen

Americans not only have a deep and positive sense of history but are

particularly invested in their own special place in the world. There is no needfor the national myth to be explicitly stated as such and, in fact, leavingit implicit or denying its very existence in everyday discourse gives itgreater efficacy. Americas core myth is embedded in its deep culture andenshrined in its institutions of power.

The American Myth is a collection of stories and cherished presuppo-sitions living in the collective memory that has been filtered and editedby various mythmakers since the early 1600s. Because of its persistentusage, it has acquired the power of shaping an important part of Americancharacter. Embedded within the Myth are ideological concepts, along



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with values and beliefs that can be found in its literature, film and art.

Collectively, they shape Americas public policy. Much of the Myth hasbeen distilled into symbols, icons, clichs, customs, rituals, parades, f lags,ceremonies, museums, codified language, and mythic symbolism thatAmericans assume implicitly and understand subconsciously.

For a myth to be robust it must subsume or whitewash over hard factsthat are disturbing, that would demystify many beliefs, and that wouldlead to sociopolitical disorder. There havebeen serious crises of Myth inAmerican history when a combination of forces undermined the Mythslegitimacy in the popular mind. But in all such cases the Myth wasrestored, after being refurbished for a new era into a more powerful myththan before. Myths such as the Frontier myth we are about to explorehave given America a tremendous sense of purpose and have channeled itsenergies for a long time.

Myths play a vital role in intercivilizational encounters. The peoplethe Americans encountered did not often have powerful, world-altering,grand myths of their own. Even in the early decades when the NativeAmericans had a relative parity of f ighting capability, they had no grandnarrative of their own that could give them unity and a grand purpose tofight the settlers. Their counter-myths lacked the organizing power of theAmerican myths. Their existence thus became fitted into the Americannarrative rather than having legitimacy as a separate counterforce.

Founding of America, the City upon a Hill

Key among the myths brought by Puritans from Europe was the notionof being a chosen people with special backing from God. This wasadapted in America and shaped the common identities of Americans.The City upon a Hilland Garden of Edenwere two primary images withwhich Americans identified themselves early on (Dunn 1997).1 Laterthese evolved into more robust myths of the Frontierand Manifest Destiny.The idea of America as the unique and hence privileged City upon aHill has become interwoven throughout our history and our foreignpolicy, writes Duke University professor Gerald Wilson. The City upona Hill image surfaces frequently in speeches by many presidents including

John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt,Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Reagan foundit an instant crowd pleaser. Ive spoken of the Shining City all my politi-cal life, he said in his farewell address.

In the early colonial period the unsettled parts of America (i.e., theareas not yet conquered from the natives) were seen as satanic wilder-ness, and this wilderness represented temptation, threat and adversity.This space outside the White territories was called the Frontier. JohnMather (in 1693) suggested that going through this wilderness was a nec-essary stage that God expected them to pass through in order to reach



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the Promised Land. This meant that America was destined to becomethe

Paradise but that it required their effort. This included the sacred missionto capture the wilderness and tame its natives. Only then would itbe the Garden of Eden. The pragmatic and enterprising spirit that is thehallmark of Americas achievements is linked to this belief.

The wilderness was both a threat and an opportunity. Henry NashSmiths seminal book, titled Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol andMyth,is one of the most thoughtful and detailed studies of Americas deepcultural history. One of the very important ideas of America, he explains,has been the tremendous opportunity offered by a vacant continentan unspoiled Eden for Gods chosen people. The American Myth hasconsisted of the Eden/Frontier pair. Eden is the space belonging to us,and the Frontier represents the satanic wilderness inhabited by others.The mission entrusted to Americans is to constantly expand Eden (or itssecular equivalent, Civilization) by taking over the Frontier. This Mythhelped to generate cohesiveness among the settlers by projecting varyingdegrees of otherness onto the Native Americans, who were seen as apart and parcel of the wilderness. The Eden myth gradually evolved inthe popular American mind so that it projected all evil externally. HenryNash Smith writes that even after the American land mass was taken overby Europeans, they continued to blame outsiders for evil influences.Americans had a sense of self-righteousness about their actions:

Neither American [White] man nor the American continent con-

tained, under this interpretation, any radical defect or principle ofevil. But other men and other continents . . . were by implicationunfortunate or wicked. This suggestion was strengthened by the ten-dency to account for any evil which threatened the garden empireby ascribing it to alien intrusion. Since evil could not conceivablyoriginate within the walls of the garden, it must by logical necessitycome from without . (Smith 1950, p. 187)

At each stage of the evolution of this national Myth there has been thenotion of progress through savage wars which are required to redeemthe American spirit, and to reinforce the struggle. And every manprovided he was Whitewas equally f it for this struggle, and a true rep-resentative of civilization. This made Americans the exceptional peopleand dif ferent from Europeans.

The landscape of the Frontier Myth is partitioned by a moral demarca-tion separating civilization and wilderness. The Frontier has been both ageographical place and a mythic space populated by various fantasies. Itsmyths were about Native American Indians as savages, Blacks as inferior,White men as heroes, White women in need of being rescued from sav-ages (and non-White women to be similarly rescued from their savagemales), the Frontier as Americans right and responsibility to conquer,Manifest Destiny as their destiny to defeat others. The story of America



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thus became mythologized as the struggle of the civilized dwellers of

Eden against the savages of the wild Frontier.

Mutations of the Myth

The Myth mutated from its Christian base to include an Enlightenmentbase over time. Between 1795 and 1830 the agrarian expansion was verysuccessfully accomplished, and the Christian-eschatological substructureof the original Frontier Myth was overlaid with a more secular ideol-ogy. This and the subsequent rapid industrialization of America by 1870fueled American mythmaking about the success of an exceptional people(Slotkin 1998, p. 17).

In each stage the basic blocks of Americas core Myth have been thesame:

1. We are the foremost among good and righteous people.2. There is danger and darkness on the other side.3. A frontier exists that has to be won and captured for the sake of

civilization.4. Any cost would be acceptable and all methods are okay including

savage wars. The myth of regenerating civilization through vio-lence is a key organizing principle.

5. Civilizations innocence is represented as White women in the cap-

tivity of savages. The rescue of these women is the hallmark of mas-culine heroism, especially if it is done violently.

6. Ultimately, Good always prevails over Evil and this happy endingreinforces the Myth.

The Frontier Myth has served as a principle for nation-building. And itsbuilding blocks have been powerfully reinforced by popular history writ-ing. Once a genre of historical writing (and later movies) gained currencyand became entrenched, it supplied the conventions that popular writersand others have followed in order to have their works accepted easily. Sopowerful is this Myth that it has captured the imaginations of Americansfor the past few centuries, and it continues to serve progressives and con-servatives, politicians across the spectrum, popular culture scriptwriters,historians, military strategists, and designers of childrens games. Thus thecycle of mythmaking has perpetuated itself (Slotkin 1998, p. 4).

Americans are proud and nostalgic when they are constantly remindedof their history in terms of this Frontier Myth. It idolizes the national herowho is tough, capable, a team player and confrontational. Ronald Reaganevoked the images of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood to explain hisaggressive cowboy foreign policies to the American public. Many intel-lectuals may have thought him shallow, but he resonated with Americans,and they loved him.



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The Manifest Destiny of an Exceptional People

The term Manifest Destiny was coined in 1845 both to rationalize Americasthirst for expansion in the prior several decades and to defend Americasclaim to new territories that were further west of the original colonies:

. . . the r ight of our to overspread and to possessthe whole of the continent which Providence has given us for thedevelopment of the great experiment of liberty and federated selfgovernment entrusted to us. It is a right such as that of the tree tothe space or air and the earth, suitable for the full expansion of itsprinciple and destiny of growth. (OSullivan 1845)

This was an imaginative metaphor that validated an already existing andviolent aspect of Americas history and Americans self-image as the worldsextraordinary people. The term Manifest Destiny was quickly adopted byU.S. congressmen in their debates to justify three territorial conquests: theforced annexation of Texas from Mexico in 1845, the negotiated annex-ation of Oregon from England in 1846 and the war with Mexico whichresulted in the annexation of much of the southwest in 1848. Althoughthis was initially a Democratic Party ideal, the Whigs (who later becamethe Republicans) also supported it.

The idea of acting on Gods behalf naturally included the importanceof fighting evil. Henry Nash Smith writes that the Manifest Destiny

myth helps Americans understand the image of themselves whichmanyperhaps mostAmericans of the present day cherish, an imagethat def ines what Americans think of their past, and therefore what theypropose to make of themselves in the future (Smith 1950, Preface).

By 1849, Manifest Destiny became synonymous with seizing landfrom the natives, and this greed fed the frontier mentality. The settlersattempts to forcibly occupy Native American lands by brutal means werecommonly explained by prominent leaders as acts that were necessaryagainst savages. This theorizing was done by elitist intellectuals but italso had broad support from the lower classes of European settlers becausemore land became available for them to share. Accounts of the nativetribes counter attacks and atrocities were highlighted, and such accountsare stil l used in history textbooks and national monuments to remove guiltabout White expansion.2The City upon a Hill and Manifest Destiny werepowerful narratives that provided the logic for expansion by marking thenatives as the barbarous and expendable.

The expansion westward also became a popular theme of American litera-ture, infecting both liberals and conservatives. Walt Whitman, a liberal whois seen by many Americans as their national poet, was fascinated by AmericasManifest Destiny and his poems often glamorized the westward expansion.3In the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass(1855), Whitman explainedthat United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. He fantasized



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a nation that was expanding endlessly to include Central America and the

Caribbean, and wrote in a newspaper article that manifest destiny certainlypoints to the speedy annexation of Cuba by the United States.

Encounter with Native Americans

Christianity, Enlightenment ideas, and greed often colluded to producea result that annihilated the natives and built up America into a superna-tion. These three forces are summarized below:

Biblical Myths

Lieven explains that the biblical myths were a driving force for set-tlers from the very beginning: The Old Testament gave the set-tlers . . . both a language and a theological framework in which todescribe and justify their dispossession of the lands native inhabi-tants (Lieven 2004, p. 101).

Long before the term Manifest Destiny was explicitly proposed, theEnglish Protestant reinterpretation of millennium theology was broughtover to America and it claimed America as having a special place in Godsplan.4The United States became seen as the key agent in bringing themillennial prophecy to fruition. Protestant ministers of the nineteenthcentury used it to fire up nationalism leading to the notion that was later

named Manifest Destiny. Americas special status in the Divine Plan wasalso accepted among many Christian experts in Europe.5

The Puritans initially had high hopes of converting the Indians,and their zealotry made them assume that Indians would happilyabandon their own customs and religion to accept Christianity andWhite civilized life. (This is analogous to the American certaintythat Iraqis would welcome the U.S. military as liberators and wouldenthusiastically embrace American ways.)

Disillusion followed when the Native Americans rejected religiousand cultural conversions, and fought wars to protect their traditionsand lands. When they rejected the true religion of Christianity,they began to be seen with venom and hatred as agents of the devil,and at the very least as a stumbling block to civilizational progress(Slotkin 2000, pp. 18, 66 and 522).

Horsman explains that the Indians by the latter years of the sev-enteenth century were despised because they have tried to remainIndian and had shown little desire to become Christian gentlemen.The Indians could therefore be thrown off the land, mistreated, orslaughtered, because in rejecting the opportunities offered to themthey had shown that they were sunk deep in irredeemable savagery(Horsman 1981, p. 105). See also Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism andCivilization: A Study of the Indian in the American Mind(Pearce 1967),



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Robert Berkhofer, The White Mans Indian: Images of the American

Indian from Columbus to the Present (Berkhofer 1978), and RichardDrinnon, Facing West: The metaphysics of Indian hating and EmpireBuilding(Drinnon 1997).

Nevertheless many die-hard missionaries argued in a more nuancedway that the Native Americans could be redeemed, and they continuedto be hopeful of saving them from their own cultures and religions.This process was only made easier when accompanied by the stresses ofdefeat and displacement from native lands (Deloria 1988, pp. 101124).

Enlightenment Thought

Just as the early leaders of the seventeenth century had seen thenatives as targets for religious conversion, the leaders of revolutionaryAmerica in the 1770s and later saw them as targets for their notionof civilization. They believed that if the Native Americans could becivilized by accepting the White settlers way of life then they couldbe accommodated in the vast country being explored.

Enlightenment ideas from Europe brought the notion that man couldprogress infinitely, and that all mankind belonged to the same spe-cies6and hence every race was capable of improvement.

Thus the savagery of Native Americans was a temporary stage intheir evolution and they could be eventually improved throughEuropean civilization. Enlightened and liberal Americans such as

Jefferson formulated arguments and policies regarding the natives inwhich they tried to civilize and settle them.

While seemingly benign, this argument provided a convenient rhet-oric to later justify savage war against the Native Americansinvolving their ethnic cleansing from state after state of the unionwhile simultaneously claiming that this was in their best interests.

Greed

Individual and corporate greed to seize lands was especially prevalentin the frontier. Ambitious White settlers looking for empty land to

settle and farm kept encountering different native tribes who werealready the owners and users of the land.

The frontier was a safety-valve for the economic needs of the Whitepopulation, providing endless vistas of unsettled land presumed tobe waiting there to be taken. Thus poor White immigrants (l ike theIrish, etc.) could find opportunities away from cities and hence notcause social unrest.

After the Civil War, the Native American tribes were in the wayof coast-to-coast railroad building, which was undertaken partly toopen up lucrative trade with China and India.



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It was profitable to see the Native Americans as merciless savages,

both by Christian and Enlightenment standards. A whole host of news accounts, popular literature, and illustrations

and images constantly reinforced this point by emphasizing atrocitiesby natives.

When there was no immediate goal to capture lands, the east coastmetropolitan attitudes toward Native Americans (as noble sav-ages) were often positive or at least neutral. Some urban intel-lectuals decried the violence of the White settlers in the frontierand even acknowledged that the Native Americans were fightingto protect their lands and people. One sees many examples of inter-est in the native way of life and praises for their culture. In the endthis sympathy proved transitory and ineffective in preventing theirextinction.

Such was the conflict between the selfish need to expand westward andvarious positive ideologies that expounded Americas mission to build anew and just civilization. I suggest a four-phase framework to explain thedevelopment of policies toward Native Americansa framework whichmay be useful in exploring later examples of American policy, up tothe present day. These phases were not strictly chronological, but thisframework helps understand the process by which the dangerous sav-age Native Americans were exterminated, the benign noble savageswere domesticated in reservations to be raised as children, and eventually

the native peoples were turned into an ornament glorified in museums.This f ramework traces the role played by the discourse among the intel-lectuals, the political leadership, and public opinion. I will also examinehow institutional power was systematically deployed in a legalistic man-ner as per the rhetoric of due process, but cleverly designed to excludethe Native Americans and preserve White privilege. The four phaseswere as follows:

I. Theorizing about noble savages and merciless savages dur-ing early expansion.

II. Guilt management while committing genocide.III. Indians as children to be raised in reservations.IV. Academic research to support museumizing and digestion.

Phase I: Theorizing the Savage in Early Expansion

In early America, Christianity played a key role in forming the identity ofthe settlers and in justifying the brutalities against Native Americans oncethey refused to convert. But upon Independence, the generation knownas the Founding Fathers of America was very much influenced by theEnlightenment.



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The Merciless Savage

The Protestant Ethic that became the American ethos included a strongstreak of Puritan hatred of many aspects of Native life such as their reli-gions, mysticism, dancing, singing, and reveling. While it is easy topoint out differences between Christianity and the Enlightenment, theEnlightenment can be seen as a child and a product of Puritanism. Indeedaccording to Max Weber himself, Both Puritanism and Enlightenmentmade contributions to the specific and peculiar rationalism of Westernculture . . . with Enlightenment being the surprising but true child, thelaughing heir of Puritanism (Drinnon 1997, p. 102). The Enlightenmentsupposedly freed Europeans from the constraints imposed by Christianityand claimed to have achieved an innate sense of human equality and dig-

nity. However, while removing explicit dependency on God, many bibli-cal assumptions remained a core part of its framework.7

There were important and nuanced differences. For the Puritans, theNative Americans who refused to become Christian were servants of theDevil. For the Founding Fathers, the native was the face of irrational-ity and unreason: Like the Puritan, Jefferson regarded the Indian cul-ture as a form of evil or folly. If he chose not to become Christian andcivilized then he was a madman or a fool who refused to enter theencompassing world of reason and order (Drinnon 1997, p. 102). Thiswould justify removing him from the civilized space. From either pointof view the conclusion was that the native was a savage whose culture andreligion made him merciless, cruel, irrational and incorrigible. . . . Fromthe Indian point of view the end result was pretty much the same: death,f light, or cultural castration . . . (Drinnon 1997, p. 102).

Thus while Jefferson was no Puritan, and openly rejected Christiansuperstitions,8his attempt to rationalize the world in an Enlightenmentmode was just as fanatical. For the enlightened leaders of American inde-pendence as well as for the Puritans among them, the Native Americanwas chiefly important not for what he was in and of himself, but ratherfor what he showed civilized men they and must not become(Drinnon 1997, p. 102). The Native American was the other againstwhom Americas selfhood was constructed.

Similarly for Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 1800s, native rituals like the

dance were associated with devilish ritual, and with dark thoughts of themind. In this suspicion of native religion this great post-enlightenmentAmerican writer was in agreement with puritanical demonization of it(Slotkin 2000, p. 476).

Enlightenment rhetoric was based on the rights of man and eventhis limited egalitarianism conf licted with the pragmatic demands of landgrabbing. This was resolved in the minds of many American intellectu-als including Jefferson by classifying White farmers as more evolved thanthe Native Americans who were mapped as hunter gatherers. Jeffersonwrote in the 1780s that proofs of genius given by the Indians of NorthAmerica place them on a level with the Whites in the same uncultivated



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state (Horsman 1981, p. 108). The prescription for cultivating the

Native Americans to make them civilized included forcing them toadopt private property which men farmed (whereas Native Americanmen traditionally hunted and women did the farming); teaching nativewomen spinning and weaving; and adopting Christian education. Thissocial engineering devastated Indian communities.

The aspects of native achievements that met White normssuch asagricultural settlements, commercial activity and sophisticated socialorganizationswere conveniently ignored when passing judgment onwhether they were civilized. This was to justify denying them the humanrights enjoyed by Whites by showing that they still needed to becomecivilized. Indeed there is extensive but rarely aired evidence of manipula-tion and hypocritical double-speak by Jefferson and other enlightenedthinkersconstantly urging the Indian tribes to civilize and settledown while maneuvering to usurp their lands through engineered debtsand force (Horsman 1981, p. 106; see also Fairchild 1928).

The Noble Savage

The Enlightenment also included a romantic urge to look beyond Europefor utopian and unspoiled regions. In the debate about the nature of theNative American not all saw him as a merciless savage. There was eventhe idea of the native as a noble savage who could be used to contrastagainst the vices of a decadent Europe. This became a popular stereotype.When certain European writers portrayed life in America as degenerateand associated this with natives, Americans such as Jefferson vigorouslydefended the native character as a part of defending the country. NativeAmericans had become our Indians for many patriotic and patronizingAmericans (see Gerbi 1973 and Horsman 1981, p. 106).

Some Americans clearly realized that the prevailing genocide anddestruction of native tribes would be judged harshly by history. GeorgeWashingtons secretary of war, Henry Knox, wrote in 1793 that, if ourmodes of population and war destroy the tribes, American conductwould be matched with the Spaniard atrocities in Mexico and Peru, andthis would undermine the American claim to moral superiority overSpaniards (Knopf 1960, p. 165).

The general White population who were rapidly expanding their landsby encountering the Native Americans on a day-to-day basis rejected suchEnlightenment thought of civilizing them. Natives were regarded as hea-then and violent savages. But East Coast intellectuals wrote idealisticallyand with detachment, because there were no Native Americans left forthem to deal with, most eastern tribes having been displaced and dis-banded by the 1800s. But Whites on the frontier were fighting NativeAmericans for their lands and this fueled hatred toward them (Horsman1981, p. 111). Even though there were multiple voices, the Whites con-trolled the ultimate outcome of such debates and hence the fate of thenatives, because the Native Americans were simply not self-represented.



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The phrase merciless Indian Savages is used to describe the Native

Americans in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. Drinnonnotes that this was consistent with earlier Christian explicit condemnationsof the Native Americans as heathen, animalistic and sub-human (Drinnon1997, p. 99). Even though every other phrase in this vital Americandocumentliterally the countrys birth certificatewas debated andrepeatedly revised before signing, this one phrase was not debated orchanged from the first draft to the final version. Everyone simply agreedwith it! To this day there is reluctance and ambiguity about admitting therole of top Enlightenment intellectuals as well as Christianity in denigrat-ing native cultures and religions, and thus paving the pathway for theirgenocide. In studies of the Declaration of Independence the exclusion ofBlacks from the process is often noted, because Black scholars have nowbecome a strong and independent voice. But Drinnon points out that thedemonization of Native Americans is even today rarely discussed in schol-arly or popular studies of that famous document (Drinnon 1997, p. 102).

Phase II: Guilt Management while Committing Genocide

The greatest episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide of NativeAmericans occurred in the period following independence that was domi-nated by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Before Andrew Jacksonspresidency (and the massive removal, i.e., ethnic cleansing, of Native

Americans) there was some debate between the Enlightenment view ofthe native as an innately equal human being who could be improved(if only he wanted to be), and the opposing side which considered himinherently a savage beast. But by Jacksons time the debate was faltering:Even those who considered Native Americans as equal human beings hadcompletely internalized the portrayals of their culture and religions asdebasing and cruel and in need of Christianizing and/or civilizing.

This new consensus about Native American culture/character providedconsiderable leverage to those who considered the Native Americansan expendable obstruction in the path of Americas destined expansion.These arguments were reinforced by a variety of scientific and intellectualarguments, from phrenology to Hegels philosophy of History. This intel-

lectual construction about Native Americans paved the way for their sub-sequent removal with President Andrew Jacksons enthusiastic support. Itculminated as a major victory for supremacist ideas which had long beenpart of Americas deep culture.

There were several levels at which the Indian Removal, that is, eth-nic cleansing and the resulting genocide, was justified and carried out:

1. Biblical and Enlightenment based intellectual justifications2. Anecdotal data of atrocities committed by the Natives3. Good Cops and Bad Cops



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4. Institutional and legalistic manipulations

5. Displacement for their own good

In each of these levels, the Native Americans were outsiders, non-playersin the intellectual-political-moral game that sealed their fate. They couldfight tactical battles bravely, but they were not even participants in thediscourse.

1. Biblical and Enlightenment-based Intellectual Justifications

Besides personal success and wealth, the Americans of the 1700s and 1800salso wanted a clean religious conscience. To resolve this dilemma, theMyth blamed the savages for the violence even when it was committed

by White Americans (Horsman 1981, p. 210). Slotkin and many othersexplain that this charge is better understood as an act of psychologicalprojection that made the Indians scapegoats for the morally troubling sideof American expansion: the myth of savage war became a basic ideo-logical convention of a culture that was itself incredibly devoted to theextermination or expropriation of the Indians and the kidnapping andenslavement of black Africans (Slotkin 2000, p. 12).

Stephenson sees the influence of two important authorities that shapedthe sustained genocidal attack on the Native Americans in a manner thatabsolved White Americans of their personal sense of guilt: one is bib-lical authority and the other is Common Law based on European and

Enlightenment underpinnings (Stephanson 1995, p. 25).In Genesis, God promises Isaac that he will make his children multiplyand give the countries of the earth to them, and in Psalms God offers hispeople the heathen for the inheritance, and uttermost parts of the earth fortheir possession, in order that the faithful biblical people should crush theheathen into pieces like a potters vessel. This message was understoodby many deeply religious Americans to be a sanction to possess, multiplyand fructify at the expense of the heathens (ibid.). Indeed, there is littledoubt that Jackson and others often saw themselves in Old Testament termsas an instrument of an avenging God (Drinnon 1997, p. 108). According toearlier Christian missionaries, Whites were Gods means for the salvationor destruction of the Indians (Slotkin 2000, p. 99).

This mindset persisted in the American deep culture two centuries afterthe Puritans arrived. The influential eastern newspaper editor Sullivancoined the phrase Manifest Destiny in 1845, and also wrote: Historywas a providential plan whose end was to be played out in the especiallydesigned space of America. . . . The Cause of Humanity was identical withthat of the United States, and that cause was destined to cease only whenevery man in the world should be finally and triumphantly redeemed(Stephanson 1995, p. 40).

Advocates of common law believed that there was an obligation tocultivate the earth because it is mans nature to improve nature, where



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improving meant subduing the wilderness. And Native American cul-

ture clearly failed to do that, hence their possession of the land did notamount to proper use of it. Thus they could have no legal title to the land,at least not title that American law would have to respect and protect: Invulgar form this argument boiled down to the dual proposition that Indianswere hunters and gatherers and that the land was therefore empty, a wastethere for the taking. Plentiful evidence that they werepreexisting settlers wascompletely ignored (Stephanson 1995, p. 25). As the Governor of Georgiasaid blatantly in the 1830s, treaties with Native Americans were expedi-ents by which the ignorant, intractable, and savage people were induced toyielded up what civilized people had a right to possess (p. 26).

The land was far too precious to remain undeveloped with the NativeAmericans. A factor that worked against their chances of survival was thedifficulty in Christianizing and assimilating Native tribes as appendagesto the White settlements. Native ways of life were too closely linked withtheir ancestral lands, and with their religions and belief systems. Anotherfactor was that various scientific theories circulating from the 1830sonward indicated that Native Americans were doomed because of innateinferiority, that they were succumbing to the superior White race, andthat this was for the larger good of humanity. Indian removal and mas-sacres were not seen as such but as the result of the Laws of God, destiny,and nature (Horsman 1981, pp. 189206).

2. Anecdotal Data of Atrocities Urging Savage Wars

There was an overabundant supply of popularly accepted stories andimages on the savagery and brutality of the Native Americans that justi-fied harsh treatment toward them (similar to many of todays ethnogra-phies and reports about India and Africa). These atrocity stories servedas anecdotal data that reinforced the theories about Native Americansavagery. Their repetition by popular as well as scholarly writers was suff i-cient to block debate on substantive issues of the Indians own rights, as weshall see. It is crucial to note that both in the theoretical set up as well asin the anecdotal data-gathering, no effort was made to cross-examine theAmerican point of view. The Enlightenment and biblical theories werenever challenged nor declared problematic to the same extent as nativeculture and religion were questioned. (This bias survives in the form oftodays privileged position given to Western social theories in the acad-emy.) Furthermore, the brutalities of settlers and missionaries were neverhighlighted on par with Indian actions. There were no reverse gazingnative scholars looking at White culture to counterbalance the discourse.

The earlier romantic image of the Native American as a noble sav-age lingered on in the 1800s. Even as their White brethren were eradi-cating the Native Americans, important American writers, such asNathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, andJames Fennimore Cooper, continued to portray the native as a tragic



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and somewhat noble figure although with some rough and savage edges.

These writings had a sense of tragedy based on a sense of inevitabilitynature had predestined the Indian for destruction in the face of progress(Fussel 1965). This was a more humane portrayal than the beastly savageimage, but it did not prevent their extermination, nor did it attempt to fixblame on Manifest Destiny or Enlightenment thought.

Offsetting this high literary image of the native as a complex, tragicfigure, there were a much larger number of cheaper books and pamphletsthat were popular among White readers. This best-selling Indian atrocityliterature chronicled the captivity of various Whites, especially womenand children, at the hand of Native Americans on the frontier. Today, wewould say that they portrayed the Native Americans as egregious humanrights violators and stereotyped their religion and culture as being the cul-prits. Many of these sensationalized stories were one-sided exaggerationsof actual incidents and many others were outright lies. Their main appli-cation was to provide an excuse for usurping Indian lands (Brands 2005,p. 170 and Slotkin 2000, p. 97). Popular stories and theater productions inthe seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries commonly showedpure White maidens and peaceful White men being captured by fierceand atrocious Native American raiders, and heroic White men rescuing thebeautiful women from the ugly men. Richard Slotkin explains that Thegreat and continued popularity of these narratives, the uses to which theywere put, and the nature of the symbolism employed in them, are evidencethat the captivity narratives constitute the first coherent myth-literature

developed in America for American audiences (Slotkin 2000, p. 95).The captivity narrative was among the most popular form of American

adventure story in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. Thehero of the captivity narrative is typically a White woman or a Christianminister who is captured by Natives during a savage war. The captivesymbolizes the values of Christianity and civilization that are imperiledin the wilderness by the non-Christian savage. This is the Myth of theFrontier in which the triumph of civilization over savagery is symbolizedby the hunter/warriors rescue of the White woman held captives by sav-ages (Slotkin 2000, p. 15).

The native religions were regarded as witchcraft. Sometimes, womenwho were captured and rescued, if they showed any strange behavior,were tried as witches. The idea conveyed was that close association withthe non-Christian and their evil, devilish religion had turned a goodChristian into a witch, i.e.[,] a pagan. Such a person was given sympathyand de-programmed by a Pastor, unlike other witches who were tried andpunished. (This is eerily similar to the de-programming of Christians whojoin eastern religions and cults today.) But more importantly, the reputa-tion of the Native Americans and their evil religion was reinforcedbecause of the narratives of these psychological ly ill women who in a senseconverted to native religion and then came back to Christianity to tellthe tale. Confessions were often obtained to show that the woman in



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question had taken up a Native American god for worship. In the 1700s,

this thinking about the corrupting nature of native religion and captivitybecame a great cause for brutality and savagery against the natives (Slotkin2000, pp. 138140, 142 and 144145).

3. Good Cops and Bad Cops

The landscape of the Frontier Myth is partitioned by a moral demarcationseparating civilization from the wilderness, a civilizational euphemismderived in order to distinguish civilized Whites as distinct from uncivi-lized non-Whites. The real issue of course was greed for land and theneed to dominate others, but these had to be justif ied in order to quiet the

grumblings of the conscience.

Although the white Americans . . . wanted personal success andwealth, they also wanted a clear conscience. If the United States wasto remain in the minds of its people a nation divinely ordained forgreat deeds, then the fault for the suffering inflicted in the rise topower and prosperity had to lie elsewhere. White Americans couldrest easier and the sufferings of other races could be blamed on theracial weakness rather than on whites relentless search for wealth andpower. (Horsman 1981, p. 210)

Right from the beginning of an independent America, a paradox existed

between the Enlightenment view of nativesas innately equal humansbeings who, given proper training, could be civilizedand the opposingview, that considered them subhuman beasts. Thomas Jefferson laudedIndians as noble and unspoiled, yet was ambivalent about their positionand fate. He saw their extinction as tragic, yet during both terms of hispresidency tens of thousands of Indians were forcibly relocated from theirnative habitats to reservations west of the Mississippi River. This double-faced strategy played out consistently throughout the early era of Americasnationhood.

The historian Richard Drinnon gives several graphic illustrations ofhow American literature of the period provided justifications for ignoringthe natives rights.9The literature often acknowledged that the other sidehad a case in its favor, but the debate never got serious and simply servedto assuage the American conscience.

In many of these tales, there was a sympathetic figure who tried tomake the case for the Indians. This is a historical version of the urban,liberal White good cop who feels pity and objects to the unfairdemonology and the killings of natives by an unsophisticated but cou-rageous frontiersman, the bad cop. This fictional spokesman for theEnlightenment may express shock; he may suggest that humane valuesand fairness in battle should not be forgotten; he may also raise uncom-fortable questions about the natives inherent right to control their own



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lands. Thus both meta-level issues and issues about the specific methods

used by the frontiersman could potential ly be raised in the storyline.The classic device in these stories to end the debate with a clear con-

science now comes to the forefront. The frontiersman (often the heroof the tale) shows the liberal reader extensive evidence of the personalthreats and danger he lives with every day. He may show the graves offamily members and tell tales of natives atrocities against Whites, espe-cially women and children, and also, if possible, against other natives. Atthis point the good cop in the Frontier Myth backs off and reluctantlyconcedes that he, like other educated White consumers of these stories,should not be so quick to judge the frontiersmen, who seem to haveample justification for their violent behavior. After all, these frontiersmenknow the native culture best. Moreover they are clearly victims of thesavages threats and actions.10 (We can see a modern parallel when thisassumption of objectivity and expertise about native cultures is attrib-uted to todays Area Studies experts in the American academy.)

Once the savagery of the native is proved in this manner, the discussionis closed. The substantive issues of White greed and aggression, and thenatives inherent human rights to defend their sacred sites and families,and the huge imbalance between White and native atrocities, are neverdiscussed. Drinnon writes, Yes, the reader was asked to reflect, is it nottoo easy to be virtuous at a distance? The White liberal conscience wasthus convinced not to forgive merciless savages when we ourselves havenot suffered . . . at their hands (Drinnon 1997, p. 127).

There was often a very interesting good cop/bad cop partner-ship between the government and frontiersmen (Drinnon 1997, 483n).Andrew Jacksons excesses against the natives (as bad cop) were greetedwith public criticism by other top officials (the good cop). John QuincyAdams was asked to investigate Jacksons actions. He produced a whitepaper in which he avoided dealing with substantive issues, such as gather-ing data on White militias atrocities and the White communities thirstfor land. The debate was easily shifted by simply raising the bogey ofcivilization in danger from savage attacks by natives. This approacheliminated any serious analysis and soul-searching. Adams was not actingin isolation but relying on the writing of important Enlightenment think-ers. This switch the debate approach has always had support from theAmerican establishment, sometimes fairly explicitly. All former Americanpresidents alive at the time endorsed Adams. Thomas Jefferson felt that bylinking the usurpation and ethnic-cleansing of native lands by the UnitedStates to their inherent savagery, the white paper was a triumph of logic,and would help maintain in Europe a correct opinion of our politicalmorality (Drinnon 1997, p. 111). The good cops conceded the debate andviolence was justified and approbated by powerful government officials.

Even those who did not indulge directly in this sort of atrocity litera-ture were heavily influenced by the projected attitudes. Most Americanssimply assumed that the uncivilized Native American was doomed for



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to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate . . . their possessions,

and goods, and to convert them to . . . [Christian] use and profit . . . This Doctrine was later reinforced by a later Pope to legitimizeChristopher Columbus conquests. European nations upheld andimplemented this Doctrine as the legal and moral basis for colonial-ism (Brands 2005, p. 310). Marshalls 1823 decision reestablished thatprinciple in American law.

Contesting Who speaks for the Indians: When the land belonging tothe various tribes was to be demarked, Whites raised disputes aboutthe fitness of various Native American spokespersons. They claimedthat those who were savvy about Western ways, who thought stra-tegically and had leadership skills, who were literate, and who laidclaim to territorial boundaries were not the real Indians. Theywere too Westernized and hence illegitimate. In other words,Whites wanted the benign or incompetent or unconfident Indianto represent the tribes. Thus Jackson claimed that issues of terr itorialboundaries were not real Indian issues because: In this matter theIndiansI I, are little concerned. It is a stratagem only acted upon by the design-ing half-breeds and renegade white men who have taken refuge intheir country (Brands 2005, p. 310). These issues were especiallyraised in the context of potential disputes between tribes to furtherweaken the legitimacy of hard-bargaining spokespersons. Thus onlythe claims of the nave and the pliable were considered legitimate.

Quite often, since the tribes were devastated, uprooted and disori-ented, their cohesiveness and leadership was under duress. In thisvulnerability, one leader or splinter group could be induced to signa treaty giving up an entire tribes land. Once signed, there was noappeal (e.g., the Treaty of New Echota made it possible to removethe entire Cherokee tribeeven though historians agree that it wassigned by a splinter group within the tribe).

Federal treaties with native tribes attacked by states: This convenient f lexi-bility of the law meant that treaties made when the Native Americanswere strong and prepared to fight could later be abandoned whenthey were weakened. Those treaties signed by the U.S. Federal gov-ernment that did not suit could be nullified using complex argu-ments about States rights and Federal rights. Even where the NativeAmericans had civilized themselves, the Whites started legal f ightsby arguing that states rights were being compromised by federal trea-ties with the tribes. Thus, this became a legal tussle about the rights ofWhites argued between competing White institutions, while ignor-ing Native American rights.

Tribal identity attacked by substituting individual property for tribal rights:State governments sought to remove collective tribal rights bysubstituting individual rights for Native Americans. Besides void-ing the effect of the federal treaties with tribes, this also had the



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effect of breaking up group cohesion among the natives, because

tribal identities and social capital was the fabric of their societies.12

Moreover, before the Civil War these individual rights were framedas belonging to free citizens of color, a status better than Blackslaves but below that of Whites. Enlightenment thinkers in PresidentJohn Quincy Adams 1825 Cabinet hoped that the civilized natives(i.e., those who gave up their traditional ways and adopted Westernways) could be given individual lots of land and live along withWhites in the states where they already lived. But privately, even aCabinet member who publicly attacked the ruthlessness involved inWhite Americans expansion expressed the view that it was impos-sible to civilize Indians . . . it was not in their nature. He believed theywould be destined to extinction . . . he did not think them as a race,worth preserving. He considered them as essentially inferior to theAnglo-Saxon raise which were now taking their place on this con-tinent . . . and their disappearance from the human family will be nogreat loss the world (Horsman 1981, p. 198).

Elimination of natives individual land ownership: But after taking awaytheir group rights and substituting some form of individual prop-erty, Whites squeezed further. Some states like Georgia successfullypressured Congress to help eliminate not only tribal land but alsoindividual land ownership by Native Americans within their state(Horsman 1981, p. 196).

Merging tribes into one big tribe under the Union: Under pressure from

rebellious states on this serious matter, the federal governmentsCabinet was divided and ended up promoting unrealistic options, suchas that Native Americans should be removed but that they shouldbe brought into civilization and incorporated into the Union bycombining the various tribes into one big tribe and moved to a sepa-rate territory far away.

Fair exchange of eastern land for western land. The federal governmentendorsed the policy of taking native lands in the east in exchange forlands in the west, but insisted that this could be done only by vol-untary consent of the tribes. These ideas about re-engineering andmoving the tribes were proposed as a sop to the conscience of theWhites, with little regard to the trauma and human suf fering of sucha huge move. It also ignored the fact that the new lands were almostalways of lesser value. Even the Native Americans lucky enough tobe relocated to petroleum-rich land in Oklahoma would later havea hard time holding on to it when the value of the land under theirfeet became known. As Horsman notes, Indian Removal was notan effort to civilize them under more favorable circumstances eventhough that was how the Jacksonians justif ied the measure afterward.It was a blatant act to enable the Whites to occupy all the lands theywanted east of the Mississippi River (Horsman 1981, p. 199).

Confusing debates to seem fair-minded: All through this, White Americansdebated with each other over what to do with the natives and what



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rationale to use to make sure the process was (or would at least

appeared to be) righteous, fair-minded and based on the rule of law.Brands and other historians have noted that this was a characteristicapproach: using a series of confusing and contradictory manipula-tions to impose conditions of despair and then using these adversitiesas excuses for further damage (Brands 2005). Even those voices ingovernment who opposed the forcible removal of Native Americanstended to ultimately go along with political and legal choices thatenabled Whites to have more rights. Pessimism about the nativesability to survive as a race and as cultures became self-fulf illing.

5. Displacement for Their Own Good

Policies to grab Indian lands would often be couched in language thatseemed to indicate humanitarian concern for the well-being of the NativeAmericans and a condescending spirit of compromise. For instance, theinitial argument for Indian removal was positioned as a way for them toretain their wild life by moving further away from White settlements.The wide open spaces on the other side of the Mississippi were believed tobe more conducive to the Indian way of life even though it meant forc-ibly uprooting entire tribes and communities from their ancestral landsand transplanting them to regions where their old farming technologydidnt always work.

Upon Andrew Jacksons election as president in 1828, the debates ended,

and forced removal of the native tribes became a hard reality. Excerptsfrom several of Jacksons annual speeches to Congress over the years tell aremarkable story of the dulling of the collective conscience through theuse of the hypocritical claim that whatever was being done was in the bestinterests of the Native Americans. Here are some highlights:

In his first annual address in 1829, President Jackson laid out his pol-icy for relocating Native Americans to territories hundreds of milesaway from their lands, calling this an act of sympathy to save themfrom catastrophe.13To avert this calamity, and to protect Americassense of national honor and humanity, Jacksons policy becamethe law known as the U.S. Indian Removal Act.

In his second annual message to Congress, President Jackson blatantlysupported further actions in the name of civilization defeating theuncivilized.14He used the inexorable march of destiny to providephilosophical consolation to those whose conscience was troubled.15

Yet another important argument he gave was that the Native Americanshad themselves invaded America in the distant past and had extermi-nated (mythical) older civilizations that had once flourished there.16

In his fourth annual message to Congress, President Jackson describedhow native uprisings were put down by heroic White soldiers, butomitted mentioning that he had refused to implement the U.S.Supreme Courts ruling in favor of the Native Americans, thereby



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making a mockery of the U.S. law when it did not suit the interests

of the deep White culture.17

In his fifth annual message to Congress, President Jackson rational-ized the inevitability of the extermination of native tribes.18

The prevailing hypocrisy in dealing with Native Americans was not loston Alexis De Tocqueville, the famous European observer of nineteenth-century America. While de Tocqueville admired many things aboutAmerica, he could not help saying sarcastically about the treatment ofnatives: It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws ofhumanity (de Tocqueville 1966, p. 30).

Phase III: Indians as Children Protectedin Reservations

Once the merciless savage had been uprooted to a contained area awayfrom his land, laws and customs, he could then be managed and raisedas a child. His savage religion could be replaced with superior Christianity.This was the culmination of an Enlightenment idea that saw non-Whitesas racial and cultural children. Jefferson, who did not seem to considerNative Americans as racially inferior (unlike Blacks), nevertheless believedthat their backward religion and culture made them incapable of decision-making in the same autonomous way that White adults could.19

In 1831, the Supreme Court had already declared that all Native Americantribes were a dependent nation, thereby allowing them to be categorizedas subjects or wards. Thus, the long prevalent Enlightenment view ofnon-Whites as backward children needing to be tutored by Whites wasgiven a new legal basis, thus nullifying the supposedly universal right toconsent to ones own government (Stephanson 1995, p. 26).

Several notable Americans who admitted that Native Americans had beenharmed by White expansion now openly proposed that the only option toenable the natives to flourish was to put them under the direct protectionof the Anglo-Saxons. The self-congratulatory argument was that enslave-ment and protection had allowed Blacks to grow their population in Americawhile the Indians had declined in number (Horsman 1981, p. 203)!

A few isolated voices challenged the notion of the Native Americansbeing inferior especially if they were educated and Christianized. Inother words, their backward condition was not permanent, but like chil-dren, given time and a chance to learn true religion they could beredeemed. Congressmen testified that there were many individuals ofseveral tribes . . . who were as intelligent as nine tenths of the membersof [Congress] (Horsman 1981, p. 204). Others pointed out that it waspreposterous to conclude that a whole nation of people were destitute ofthe ability to improve themselves (ibid.). But while defending some spe-cific Native Americans as individuals, even such liberal Americans were



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unwilling to stand up for Native American cultures or for their collective

identities. One Congressman was brutally honest and insightful in his rareassessment that it was natural that Americans should look for the causesof Indian disappearance among the Indians rather than among the whites,but this was a false search (ibid.).

Ultimately, the very few true friends the Native Americans had inpositions of power and public influence were simply overwhelmed andexhausted by the pervasive demonizing of the Native Americans in newsreports and popular literature. Any rare episode of natives defensive resis-tance against the taking of their lands was exaggerated over and over againto condemn them as savages.

Attempts by non-Whites to unite were particularly targeted as evil. Onewatershed event in this regard took place in the early 1840s when escapingBlack slaves joined hands with Indian tribes in Florida to attack Whites set-tled on captured lands. The conflict was especially threatening as an alli-ance of the colored races versus the Whites: Wilderness threatening Eden.The well-popularized image of the native as a brutal savage was revivedby a Congressman who dramatically held up a spear-point that he claimedwas removed from the body of a child, and who then called for the exter-mination of the Native Americans because they had proved once again thatthey are demons, not men. They have the human form but not the humanheart. Public figures who expressed sympathy for the Native Americanswere silenced by telling them that this sympathy was misplaced becausethe colored races were attacking White Christians. Senator Thomas Hart

Benton used atrocity literature testimonies in Congress and campaignedto overrule the land rights of natives and build a railroad corridor to thePacific coast for the purpose of trade with India (Horsman 1981, p. 204).

Because of the popular demonology of Native Americans and pseudo-scientific research to show their innate inferiority, ironically enough,the only defenders remaining were missionaries claiming that althoughNative Americans were presently savages they could be rescued by con-verting them to Christianity. Further physical genocide could be pre-vented by completing the cultural genocide. Sadly, freedom lovingAmericans explained away their genocide of Native Americans as thenatives inability to adapt to civilization: As American hopes of creat-ing a policy based on Enlightenment ideas of human equality failed, andas it relentlessly drove the Indians from all areas desired by the whites,Americans transferred their own failure to the Indians and condemnedthe Indians racially (Horsman 1981, p. 207).

Phase IV: Academic Research and

the Museumizing of Indian Culture

Even as the Native Americans were being killed, relocated, and systemati-cally subjected to conditions of genocide, there was considerable interest in



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governmental and private circles for documenting and preserving impor-

tant aspects of the culture in museums and books. This was sometimes firedby the quest for knowledge or reputation via authorship. Often the motiva-tion was money through ownership of soft and hard knowledge in theform of traveling exhibits. Former frontiersmen who had made their markas Indian fighters, along with missionaries and officials who ruled overthe defeated natives, jumped on the latest bandwagon to document, paintand later photograph various aspects of Native American life, including lan-guages. Thus a famous Indian-fighting general wrote to a famous IndianOffice administrator, urging him to collect such materials for the sake ofhistory, before the tribes entirely disappeared. Often there were only one ortwo surviving members left of the great tribes (Drinnon 1997, p. 194).

Field agents and missionaries who were collecting data on NativeAmerican languages and vocabularies were urged to be especially atten-tive to any last man of his tribeto get from him the words [of hislanguage]. Such a man may be looked upon as a connecting link betweentime and eternity, as to all that regards his people; and which, if it be lostall that relates to his tribe is gone forever (Drinnon 1997, p. 192).

Writers, painters, Indian fighters, administrators, philanthropists, andmissionaries all got into this act. They knew that lining up the right part-nerships with the right Indian experts to produce these books, il lustra-tions, and traveling exhibits could be immensely profitable, and wouldmake reputations as sought after experts.

One such famous author teamed up with an Indian fighter/adminis-

trator and urged a well-known painter of scenes from Native Americanlife, urging him to join up in illustrating a forthcoming work on nativehistory: (If you) . . . join us, we shall have in ; . And this could lead to immense profit (Drinnon 1997, pp.194195). This book went on to become the definitive nineteenth-cen-tury history of the Native Americans, the multivolume McKenney andHalls History of the Indian Tribes of North America, bringing the authorsmoney and glory.

This is an important lesson to draw as it remains quite true today:Interest shown in any ethnic group by well-paid American academicsis not necessarily due to genuine altruism and deep sympathy with thatgroup. Ultimately the goal in many cases is to gain approval and valida-tion in the form of job appointments, research grants, promotions andan ego-boosting collection of studentsthat is, validation not from thehumans being studied, but from ones own peer group and from the prevail-ing establishment. The deep culture has created institutional mechanismsof peer-review, funding, tenure, censure and promotions that all schol-ars must live with. Independent scholarly research, especially on culturesof non-Whites, is unlikely to happen unless American scholars work isscrutinized and the framework seriously challenged from outside, that is,by scholars of the other culture being studied or American intellectualsoutside the academy.



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Scholarly histories of the Native Americans also portrayed their bar-

barity and savagery to the fullest extent possible. They were depicted asfierce, rapacious and untamable (Hall 1978, p. 104); also we find theIndian, when seeking revenge . . . becomes processed of an insatiate andinsane thirst for blood, which impels him to feed his passion, not onlyto the carnage of the helpless of the human race, but even by slaughterof domestic animals (Hall 1978, p. 112). It was also common in schol-arly works, as well as in the popular literature, to dehumanize NativeAmericans by comparing them physically and culturally with animalswolves, snakes and vultures were the tropes used, explicitly or implicitly(Drinnon 1997, p. 197). Sometimes an individuals criminal acts were notblamed on the individuals characteras would be the case for a Whiteperson committing the same crimebut rather his culture and religionwere blamed as savage. Thus we have this scholarly expression of sym-pathy for the Indians low moral development: . . . he has never beentaught those lessons of humanity which have, under the guidance of civi-lization and Christianity, stripped war of its more appalling horrors, andwithout which we should be no less savage than the Indians (Hall 1978,pp. 201202). The end result was that he must be cured of his religionand culture or else be destroyed.

A crucially important factor in reinforcing this message was the lackof balance in gathering and presenting opposing data or having voicesfrom the other side that would evaluate the values and power structureslinked to Whiteness or Christianity as important factors in the conflict.

The atrocity literature did not document the greater savagery and themany unprovoked attacks and systematic massacres committed by WhiteChristians against the Native Americans.

Drinnon notes dryly that it is unclear what the Native Americans them-selves thought of this great interest that was being shown in the dying tribes,cultures, religions and languages by many of the same people who weredirectly and indirectly responsible for their extinction. However the datacollectors were powerful and the native informants, translators and inter-preters had little choice and provided whatever the various scholars sought.

It is likely that this scholarly recording and museumizing of theNative American, while simultaneously carrying out popular denigration,missionary conversions and gradual genocide among them, helped assuagethe American conscience. By showing that Americans were appreciatingand memorializing the Native Americansalbeit as objects of the deadpast to be gazed atit legitimized the sense of the historical inevitabil-ity and destined melting-away of the Native American, absolving thepredator culture of any culpability.

Another method to shield the self-image from these unsavory aspectsof Americas past is to not talk about it. Popular works on American his-tory often block negativesboth of the Western intellectual traditionssoft power attacks on others as well as of Americas hard power actions.James Loewen explains: Most historians were males from privilegedWhite families. They wrote with blinders on. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,



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found himself able to write an entire book on the presidency of Andrew

Jackson without ever mentioning perhaps the foremost issue Jacksondealt with as president: the removal of Indians from the Southeast.Whats more, Schlesingers book won the Pulitzer prize (Loewen 1996,p. 273)!20 While many of todays best American historians (includingthose quoted in this chapter) are more forthright and do critique theChristian and Enlightenment lapses of the past, this knowledge of thedark side is still debated mainly in closed academic circles, and does notloom large in the public understanding of America. Indeed Americansare understandably uncomfortable when this dark history is presented.

This mythic self-righteousness hides the extended genocide of NativeAmericans in the basement of Americas collective memory in order toprevent guilt. This helps to preserve the deep culture, whose many benignand truly admirable characteristics get highlighted. But unfortunately, italso prevents Americans from learning from this experience and examin-ing the particular strains in their collective mythology and national char-acter that caused these tragedies and that continue to manifest in theirdealings with non-European, non-Christian cultures. Native Americans,as living and vibrant cultures, religions and peoples, are almost extinct.But their memories are preserved in museums, and their names live on asautomobile models, team names, commercial brands, place names, and soon. Individuals and groups among them appear to prosper as civilizedand exotic casino operators, who are part and parcel of the Americanlandscape rather than a challenge to it.

In sharp contrast there is a large White guilt toward Blacks, primarilybecause, unlike Native Americans, Blacks live in the mainstream in largenumbers, have a group identity, and have become mobilized as a voice thatwill not go away. Very importantly, Black scholars have also developed a ster-ling intellectual tradition that reverses the gaze on White culture, and havetried to challenge White frameworks by adopting Afro-centric frameworks.

The Failure of Discourse

American attitudes toward the Native Americans were complex. Internalconflicts among influential Americans remained and pro-native voicesdefinitely existed throughout this long saga. BUT NATIVE AMERICANSWERENEVERINCONTROLOVERTHEDISCOURSECONCERNINGTHEM,ANDBOTHSIDESTOTHESEDEBATESWEREWHITES.Whites for one plan wouldargue against Whites for another plan concerning the plight of the NativeAmericans. There is an important lesson here when area studies disci-plines about non-Western nations are being controlled by American insti-tutions and driven by its deep cultures worldview.

There were many periods in which the Native Americans, representedby their White supporters, seemed to be well protected and temporar-ily secure. The pendulum swings back and forth many times during this



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300 year encounter, but Native Americans continually slip in their share

of the land, their rights, and ultimately their very survival. Along theway, there were important stories of their defense by Whites as well asbetrayals and dishonesty. While the Whites always had a clear ManifestDestiny, the Native Americans did not have a comparable myth of theirown destiny to take over the earth. This meant that even those Whiteswho supported the Native Americans did so in the context of their own(superior) place in Manifest Destiny.

Native Americans did not control the discourse because of a lack oftheir own grand narrative in which to theorize about the Whites collec-tively (i.e., a deep cultural strategic advantage for the White Americans).They also lost control over the discourse because White institutions, intel-lectuals, media and writers ran the show. Since Whites controlled all threelayersdeep culture, institutions of power, and pop culturethis madeNative Americans vulnerable to cultural genocide that was followed bytheir physical ethnic cleansing.

It is indeed a sad ending. The Native Americans have slowly been repo-sitioned with great sympathy. The ideological stance and iconographyabout them has turned into a positive image of the cult of the Indian,now that he was only present in museums and ceased to be a threat. Theold Frontier has been captured already and the boundaries have moved tonew frontiers. Native American culture is now a trophy to adorn main-stream America. From its original positioning as grotesque and savage it isnow beautiful and American.

Hypocrisy as National Character

Importantly, throughout the debates on what to do about the savage,there took place an intellectual game the purpose of which was to showthat a fair and equitable due process was being carried out. The best aca-demic minds in America produced (and continue to produce) devastat-ing negative knowledge about others while seeming to be liberal and toengage in honest academic discussions. In light of this pattern, MarimbaAni, a Black scholar of White culture, provides a provocative but cogentframework to interpret White culture, suggesting that hypocrisy is anessential element of its success. She explains European/American cultureincludes moral statements whoseprimarypurpose is image projection andpolitical benefits. This is the same competence that is found in Americanadvertising, public relations and salesmanship:

Within the nature of European/American culture there exists astatement of value or of moral behavior that has no meaning forthe members of that culture. I call this the rhetorical ethic; . . . TheEuropean mind is a political one and for this reason constantly awareof the political effect of words and images as they are used for the



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purposes of manipulation. By political I mean to indicate an ego

that consistently experiences people as others; as representativesof interests defined differently and, therefore, as conflicting withthis ego. The individual is concerned, therefore, with the way inwhich his verbal expression and the image he projects can influencethe behavior of those to whom he relates . . . This is what is deeplyrooted in the American mindthe psychology of public rela-tions, salesmanship, and political strategy. (Ani n. d.)

According to Ani, Americans have a deep talent to project moral values in amanner that appears altruistic and thereby hides their own vested interests:

Because they exported (sold) this altruistic image so successfully,they have had to project themselves as adhering to this ideal; simi-larly, the projection of themselves or their motives in this way hasbeen essential to the successful imposition of this ethic on others.T . . . . A - .(Ani n. d.)

Americans honestlybelieve that their actions are intended for others good.In this way, they have fallen victim to their own myth.

Lessons from the Native American Experience

The wars against the Native Americans were concluded in the 1890s, butdeep patterns remain in the American culture which distinguish it fromother Eurocentric cultures. We have examined seventeenth-, eighteenth-,and nineteenth-century ways of dealing with the native other, whichbegan with European roots in biblical and Enlightenment thinking. Wehave traced how both these sources were used to frame the idea of theother as savage or noble, dangerous or childlike, depending on whichmodel best suited the requirements of personal greed or national expan-sion. We have seen how well-meaning people who spoke up for the nativeswere marginalized, and we have noted that the Native Americans werethe losers in part because they lacked a grand unifying myth that couldhelp them participate in the discourse that justified their destruction. Inthe following section, we will apply the same insights to an examinationof the period of American domination on a global scale, which still con-tinues in spite of recent setbacks.

Civilizations Aesthetics, Morality, and Reason

Myths are the organizing principles shared by a people to give mean-ing to their collective memories and to bring coherence to their present



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experiences and future expectations. Myths are not necessarily false, and

the functional power and effect of a myth is determined by peoples beliefin it and not the extent to which it is true. Myths are built by selec-tively picking and choosing parts of the truth that fit and help empowerthe myth while ignoring or whitewashing parts that dont. A myth con-textualizes the motifs it borrows into a coherent picture for the intendedaudience.

Biblical myths are filled with motifs that show the chaotic wilder-ness as Satanic, and Eden as the realm of Order. The struggle betweenGood and Evil is a battle between Order and Chaos. Centuries later, theEnlightenment movement in Europe removed the dependency on explicittheological references to God and Satan, but the underlying implicitprem-ises have remained the same. Eden was replaced by the secular notion ofCivilization. The Enlightenment considered Civilization to be orderlyand standing in opposition to uncivilized societies that were character-ized by Chaos. Cultural ambiguity and uncertainty are markers of Chaoswhereas Order is characterized with normative, decisive, canonized rulesand predictability. The West, as Hegel pronounced, was uniquelyendowedto lead the rest toward Civilization. Those who were not following theWest on this caravan were destined to perishthe Native Americans,Hegel wrote, were thus meant to suffer genocide, just as the Africans weresuited for slavery.

A variety of stereotypes were constructed and associated with depictingthese savages revolving around the biblical idea of chaossuch as inco-

herence, evil, socially irresponsibility, irrationality, and sometimes sexualpromiscuity. All these attributes are power-laden images. They serve ascode words that can devastate when applied, because they bring forthpowerful knots of energy hidden in the collective subconscious.

A key approach to evaluating other cultures was based on WhiteAmericans criteria of beauty and aesthetics. The savage others weredepicted as ugly and their deities and symbols were considered grotesque.The others aesthetics was also seen as a barometer of his morality. Godmade good people beautiful, and conversely, beautiful people must begood. Ideas of aesthetics are controlled by the dominant culture of thetime, and this culture likes to project itself as the image of goodness.While images of Jesus in art in the early centur ies showed him to be dark-skinned, since the Italian Renaissance he acquired White phenotypes.Only in the early twentieth century was he first painted as blonde withblue eyes. Besides aesthetics and morality, the third dimension of thisframework was about truth. The savages lacked rationality. Civilizedpeoplewho were good in looks and moralshad Reason. The triad ofbeauty-goodness-truth became commonly applied in the discourse aboutnon-White peoples (f igure 9.1).

Once any one or two out of the triad of attributes could be assertedconcerning a given savage, then all three evaluations automaticallyapplied: Grotesque deities and filth in the society signified immoralpeople who lacked reason. Poverty implied lack of rationality because



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Rm Chapter9

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