Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roosevelt was an early convert to “social Darwinism,” which led to the racist pseudoscience of eugenics. In his view, all the darker peoples were inferior, particularly Native Americans, who were destined to disappear completely. But he also regarded poor whites as inferior and distinguished himself from those “game butchers” who hunt and kill animals for profit or food. He identified with James Fenimore Cooper’s character Hawkeye and embraced the Boone myth, as men killed animals or other humans only to test and prove their manhood. Roosevelt’s hunting was for aristocrats, to revitalize the superior class of the species. Furthermore, he theorized that a new race was born with testing of settlers’ survival skills in nature, creating a new kind of aristocracy destined to rule the world. The settler “stock” that morphed into that superior species, Roosevelt asserted, was composed of Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, French Huguenots, and German and Dutch Protestants.52 However lowly and savage on Roosevelt’s scale, Native peoples played a key role in his theory of the genesis of US-settler white supremacy. He theorized that the superior European American was strengthened by not intermarrying with their defeated enemies, the Indians, which would have caused loss of vigor. Slotkin summarizes the genocidal violence inherent in the perspective: “American settlers must regain that vigor by repelling and exterminating their barbarians. Instead of biological exchange with savages of anoth...