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Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a history of Erasure and Exclusion, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, 2021

Tellingly, the first federal immigration law, which created the foundation for US immigration, was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It is crucial to recognize that when and how “immigration” as such began, it was based on overt, blatant racism and a policy of exclusion, and it has never lost that taint.

Settler Colonialism- Indigenous Erasure

Anishinabek historian Michael Witgen:

The United States imagines itself as a nation of immigrants…The United States aspired to be a settler colonial power, but the presence and persistence of Native people forced the republic to become a colonizer. The violence of settler colonial ideology is represented not only in the widespread dispossession of indigenous peoples but also in its attempt to affect their political, social, and cultural erasure…To imagine the United States as a nation of immigrants, devoid of an indigenous population, is not only a form of erasure, it is historically inaccurate. The United States was founded as, and continues to be, a nation of settler immigrants, locked into a struggle over the meaning of place and belonging with the Native nations of North America.

Hamilton the Musical – No slaves or freed slaves are portrayed

Alexander Hamilton – military man, slave owner and slave trader not an abolitionist

In the fall of 2020, a researcher at the Schuyler Mansion found evidence that had long been overlooked in letters and Hamilton’s own account books indicating that he not only bought and sold slaves but also personally owned slaves. The researcher, Jesse Serfilippi was unequivocal: “Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally…It is vital that the myth of Hamilton as the ‘Abolitionist Founding Father’ end.“

U.S. a Fiscal Military State

The United States was thus founded as the first constitutional capitalist state and an empire on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves and land (real estate). It is crucial to understand that this was exceptional in the world at that time and has remained exceptional.

Generals George Washington and Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton argued that the federal military was too weak to overawe the “savages”. The expansionist states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New York sought and gained federal protection of settler land claims. Hamilton and other Federalists invoked “savages” to justify a stronger federal state and a standing army. This elevated the dispossession of Indigenous peoples into a constitutional principal.

The Militia Act of 1792, the forerunner of the Insurrection Act of 1807, mandated a genocidal policy against the Indigenous nations of the Territory, allowing federal troops to eliminate the resistant communities in order the allow settler to occupy the land. The Militia Act was used two years later against Appalachian settlers in western Pennsylvania who were protesting an unfair tax on their distilleries. This was the sole work of Hamilton. Only with unlimited counter-insurgent war — destroying Indigenous towns, burning crops and food storage, driving inhabitants into peripheries as refugees–did the United States prevail, seizing most of present day Ohio. Military historian John Grenier writes, “For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders…”

Settler Colonialism as Genocide

“Genocide” is a legal term with a precise definition, enshrined in the international treaty the United Nations Convention on the prevention and Punishment of the crime of Genocide…it went into effect in the United States only in 1988 when the US Congress finally ratified it…There is no statute of limitations…The statute is not retroactive, so the United States is not liable under the Genocide Convention before 1988.

Within the logic of settler colonialism, genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding, but there are also specific documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations that can be identified in a least live distinct periods:
(1) the Revolutionary War period through 1832 in the Ohio Country
(2) the 1930s Jacksonian era of forced removals
(3) the 1850s California gold-rush era in Northern California
(4) the Civil War and post-Civil War era (up to 1890)
(5) the 1950s termination and relocation period

Doctrine of Discovery Legal basis of Settler Colonialism Free-Soiler Imperialism

The shadow of genocide lies in the Doctrine of Discovery, which remains a fundamental law of the land in the United States, the legal framework that informs the US colonial system of controlling Indigenous nations…It (the Doctrine of Discovery) originated in a papal bull issued in 1452 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa and enslave the inhabitants, the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.

And yet, the United States has used the Discovery Doctrine to rationalize its colonial dominion over Indigenous peoples throughout its history, citing the Marshall court precedent as recently as 2005 in the US Supreme Court case of City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians in denying the Oneida Nation land claim.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the unanimous decision.

“Free” Land Mostly Distributed to land speculators and large operators (railroads, etc.) not Families

The Federal land grants to the railroad barons–carved out of Indigenous territories–were not limited to the width of the railroad tracks, but rather formed a checkerboard of square-mile sections stretching for hundreds of miles on both sides of the right of way. This was land the railroads were free to sell to settlers in parcels for their own profit..As war profiteers, financiers, and industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan used these laws to amass wealth in the East, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker in the West grew rich from building railroads with cheap Chinese and Irish labor and eastern capital on land granted by the US government.

Self-Indigenization Psychosis The Last of the Mohicans – Daniel Boone Myth Hero

Irishman Daniel Day Lewis Stars in blockbuster movie The Last of the Mohicans

Daniel Boone TV Series

A deep psychosis inherent in US settler colonialism is revealed in settler self-indigenization. The phenomenon is not the same as the practice of “playing Indians,” which historian Philip Deloria brilliantly dissected, from the Boston Tea Party Indians to hobbyists dressing up like Indians to New Age Indians.

Dunbar-Ortiz is referring to James Fenimore Cooper’s writings, most particularly The Last of the Mohicans which was made into a blockbuster film in 1992, and the mythical legends surrounding the real world Daniel Boone 1734-1820.

Are Appalachian Scots-Irish Settlers (hillbillys) Indigenous?

Razid Khan:

The early American Republic saw the emergence of a white man’s republic, where implicit white identity gave way to the expansion of suffrage to non-property holding white males as a natural right, and the revocation of what suffrage existed for non-whites based on their racial character. The Scots-Irish were a major part of this cultural evolution, being as they were generally part of the broad non-slave holding class. They may not have had the wealth of lowland planters, but the Scots-Irish were part of the aristocracy of skin…It is true that Scots-Irish Americans are arguably among the more racist white ethnic group.

Rancher and Mormon Indigeneity – Little House on the Prairie

Settler self-indigenizing is not limited to Appalachia. Under the guise of “regional studies,”, descendants of Appalachians and other early settlers who migrated west and settled in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas, may of whom trekked on to the valleys of California and the Pacific Northwest, also carry with them the sense of being the original people and often express an affinity for their versions of Indianness, being men who claim “to know Indians.” Another site is the intermountain west where white cattle barons dominate, many of them Mormon, who have their own indigenous origin story blessed by their God.

Capitalism requires cheap or free labor – Thirteenth Amendment Loophole – To the Carceral Landscape

However, the Thirteenth Amendment included an exception to freedom from servitude: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Continental Imperialism

John Quincy Adams in 1825:

The world should be familiar with the idea of considering our proper domain to be the continent of North America. From the time we became an independent people, it was as much a law of nature that this should become our pretension that the Mississippi should flow to the sea, Spain had possession of our southern border and Great Britain was upon our north. It was impossible that centuries should elapse without finding their territories annexed to the United States.

The United States is the only rich country that has a long border with a poor and formerly European-colonized country (Mexico), which provides a permanent reserve of surplus labor. And that border was imposed by an imperialist war.

Self-Indigenization of Italians

The oppressed masses of Italian immigrants would find the attachment to Columbus an avenue to acceptance. They realized that the accepted representation of Columbus as “first founder” of the United States served to connect being Catholic and being Italian with the very birth of the United States; therefore, Italian immigrants could present themselves as descendants of the original Italian founder, not so much as immigrants but returnees, as part of the origin story of the United States.

Exclusion, Inclusion, and Erasure

The self-indigenizing narrative of being first settlers or discovers, like the Hispanos of New Mexico, the Scots Irish of Appalachia, the Irish Catholics, the western US white ranchers, and the US states adopting Columbus as first founder, appears as a requirement for citizenship acceptance, erasing the still living, still colonized Indigenous nations, the majority of whom had been removed from the eastern United States where the European immigrants made their homes…Reliance on founding myths and pursuing whiteness were not options for Chinese immigrants who began arriving on the West Coast and in New York at the same time as the Southern and Eastern European Catholic and Jewish immigrants were populating the industrial centers of the east.

In 2014 Franciscan colonizer of California Junipero Serra was canonized as a saint at the protestant Washington National Cathedral. Pope Francis officiated with Obama in attendance. Serra had presided over one the most brutal genocides and erasures in US history.

Mahmood Mamdani writes, “If the race question marks the cutting edge of American reform the native question highlights the limits of that reform. The thrust of struggles has been to deracialize but not to decolonize. A deracialized America is still a settler society and a settler state.” Attempts to “include” Native peoples as victims of racism further camouflages settler colonialism. The US polity has been trying to rid itself of Indigenous nations since first settlement. Four hundred years later, multiculturalism is the mechanism for avoiding acknowledgement of settler colonialism. Mamdani correctly observes that the very existence of Indigenous nations “constitutes a claim on land and therefore a critic of settler sovereignty and an obstacle to the settler economy.”

Perhaps that is one reason so few US historians are willing to risk their careers by writing US history objectively. Even Howard Zinn’s 1980 book, A People’s History of the United States. remains eschewed by most professional historians…

See also anthropologist David Vine’s book The United States of War.

The Afghanistan Papers, A Secret History of the the War, Craig Whitlock, 2021

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…it (this book) is an attempt to explain what went wrong and how three consecutive presidents and their administrations failed to tell the truth. All told, the Afghanistan Papers is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who played a direct part in the war. The Lessons Learned interviews, oral histories and Rumsfeld snowflakes comprise more than 10,000 pages of documents…(people) who know that the official version of the war being fed to the American people was untrue, or aggressively sanitized at best.

By 2002, few al-Qaeda followers remained in Afghanistan. Hundreds had been killed or captured, while the rest fled to Pakistan, Iran and other countries. The United States and its allies were left fighting the Taliban and other militants from the region — Uzbeks, Pakistanis, Chechens. So for the next two decades the war In Afghanistan was waged against people who had nothing to do with 9/11.

The problem was that the military had not run a counterinsurgency campaign since the Vietnam War. To figure out what to do, (David) Barno scrounged up three textbooks on counterrevolutionary warfare he had read as a West Point cadet more than twenty-five years earlier. “We had no U.S. military doctrine whatsoever at this point in time by which to guide us.”

“He (Pakistani ISI head Ashfaq Kayani) says, ‘You know, I know you think we’re hedging our bets. You’re right, we are because one day you’ll be gone again, it’ll be like Afghanistan the first time, you’ll be done with us, but we’re still going to be here because we can’t actually move the country. And the last thing we want with all our other problems is have turned the Taliban into a mortal enemy, so, yes, we’re hedging our bets.'”

The table of contents pretty much summarizes this important book

Part One: A False Taste of Victory, 2001–2002
Chapter One: A Muddled Mission
Chapter Two: “Who Are the Bad Guys?”
Chapter Three: The Nation-Building Project
Part Two: The Great Distraction, 2003–2005
Chapter Four: Afghanistan Becomes an Afterthought
Chapter Five: Raising an Army from the Ashes
Chapter Six: Islam for Dummies
Chapter Seven: Playing Both Sides
Part Three: The Taliban Comes Back, 2006–2008
Chapter Eight: Lies and Spin
Chapter Nine: An Incoherent Strategy
Chapter Ten: The Warlords
Chapter Eleven: A War on Opium
Part Four: Obama’s Overreach, 2009–2010
Chapter Twelve: Doubling Down
Chapter Thirteen: “A Dark Pit of Endless Money”
Chapter Fourteen: From Friend to Foe
Chapter Fifteen: Consumed by Corruption
Part Five: Things Fall Apart, 2011–2016
Chapter Sixteen: At War with the Truth
Chapter Seventeen: The Enemy Within
Chapter Eighteen: The Grand Illusion
Part Six: Stalemate, 2017–2021
Chapter Nineteen: Trump’s Turn
Chapter Twenty: The Narco-State
Chapter Twenty-One: Talking with the Taliban

An excellant prequel to this book is Steve Coll’s 2007 Ghost Wars account of how the CIA seeded this next conflict

We seem to have even forgotten how to be Imperialistic Extractive Capitalists by ignoring the vast endowment of natural resources in Afghanistan.

Far more value, however, lies with the country’s endowments of iron, copper, lithium, rare earth elements, cobalt, bauxite, mercury, uranium and chromium. While the total abundance of minerals is certainly vast, scientific understanding of these resources is still at an exploratory stage.Aug 31, 2021

The United States of War, David Vine, 2020

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The U.S. military has waged war, engaged in combat, or otherwise employed its forces aggressively in foreign lands in all but eleven years of its existence.

Rather than being a book about battles, this book uses military bases as windows to understand the pattern of endless U.S. wars…These bases have expanded the boundaries of the United States, while keeping the country locked in a state of nearly continuous war that has largely served the economic and political interests of elites and left tens of millions dead, wounded, and displaced.

Beyond a way of warfare, this mode of total genocidal war (against native Americans) became important to the development of a distinct U.S. identity. This identity in turn has played some role in shaping later wars and the conduct of those wars, especially against peoples deemed to be supposedly racially inferior. “Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their military tradition, and thereby part of a shared American identity.”

By the end of World War II…the United States would build and occupy some thirty thousand installations at two thousand base sites worldwide. While large numbers of bases would close at War’s end what remained was a global base network larger than any in human history…By war’s end, Roosevelt would oversee the largest expansion of bases, territory, and imperial power in U.S. History – arguably far exceeding the power of Jefferson’s purchase (Louisiana Territory).

Other “territories” (excepting the Philippines which was granted independence in 1946) remained colonies without democratic incorporated into the United States. They included Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, Guantanamo Bay, and the Panama Canal Zone.

U.S. officials further used the nation’s unchallenged military superiority at the end of World War II to dictate much of the postwar international economic system, on which geoeconomic power would be based. New global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations became important economic and political tools to open and dominate markets and maintain other countries in subordinate relationships.

“The United States did not abandon empire after the Second World War. Rather it reshuffled its imperial portfolio,…investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe.”

Across history and geography the Chagossians and others displaced by U.S. Bases abroad are thus linked along a continuum of violence to the victims of war in Southeast Asia, Iraq, and Afghanistan; to Native American peoples displaced, dispossessed, and murdered; to Angolans and Mozambicans kept under Portuguese colonial rule for decades with U.S. Aid exchanged for Azores basing rights; to Indonesians slaughtered in a U.S. Supported genocide; to Cubans and Haitians and many others killed during dozens of U.S. Invasions in Latin America; to Guatemalans and Chileans tortured, assassinated, and disappeared during U.S. Based coups; to the enslavement, murder, and disenfranchisement of African-Americans over centuries; to attacks on immigrants and religious and sexual minorities in the United States; and to the poor in the United States whose bodies are so often ground up by the workings of everyday capitalism and the U.S. Wars they are so often sent to fight.