Nautica Western’s Reviews > An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States > Status Update

“A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: ‘I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.’”

“Land-poor white rural people saw Jackson as the man who would save them, making land available to them by ridding it of Indians, thereby setting the pattern of the dance between poor and rich US Americans ever since under the guise of equality of opportunity.”

“All the presidents after Jackson march in his footsteps. Consciously or not, they refer back to him on what is acceptable, how to reconcile democracy and genocide and characterize it as freedom for the people.”

“US citizens did not inherit their cult-like adherence to their constitution from the English. [..] the cultural persistence of the covenant idea [..] represents a deviation from the main course in the development of national identities. Arguably, both the 1948 birth of the state of Israel and advent of Nationalist Party rule of South Africa were emulations of the US founding.”

“…the official seal of the US military veterans of the ‘Spanish-American War’ (the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines) showed a naked woman kneeling before an armed US soldier […]. One may trace this recurrent altruistic theme into the early twenty-first century, when the United States still invades countries under the guise of rescue.”

“Proponents of the [disease position] refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. [..] no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining [those] conditions [..] clearly constitute genocide.”

“Not only were the commons privatized during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were also transformed into grazing lands for commercial sheep production […], creative wealth for a few and impoverishment for the many.”

“Historian Peter Linebaugh notes that whereas the anti-Muslim Crusades were attempts to control the lucrative Muslim trade routes to the Far East, the domestic crusades against heretics and commoners were carried out to terrorize poor people and at the same time enlist them in the lucrative and adventurous yet holy venture…”

“A number of independent nation-states with seats in the United Nations have less territory and smaller populations than some Indigenous nations of North America.”