powerhouse that the United States became by 1840 derived from real estate (which included enslaved Africans, as well as appropriated land). The United States was founded as a capitalist state and an empire on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves, hence the term chattel slavery; this was exceptional in the world and has remained exceptional. The capitalist firearms industry was among the first successful modern corporations. Gun proliferation and gun violence today are among its legacies.
TWO
SAVAGE WAR
So, if ever built, what will the United States Native American Genocide Memorial Museum contain: What will it exhibit?
It will be one room, a fifty-foot square with the same large photo filling the walls, ceiling, and floor.
There will only be one visitor allowed at any one time.
There will be no furniture.
That one visitor will have to stand or sit on the floor.
Or lie on the floor if they feel the need.
That visitor must remain in that room for one hour.
There will be no music
The only soundtrack will be random gunshots from rifles used throughout American history.
Reverberation.
What will that one photo be?
It will be an Indian baby, shredded by a Gatling gun, lying dead and bloody in the snow.
Sherman Alexie, from You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me1
The violence of settler colonialism stems from the use of “savage war” and is related to the militias of the Second Amendment. “Savage war”—also called petite guerre in military annals, and Anglo-America’s “first way of war” by military historian John Grenier—dates to the British colonial period and is described as a combination of “unlimited war and irregular war,” and a military tradition “that accepted, legitimized, and encouraged attacks upon and the destruction of noncombatants, villages and agricultural resources . . . in shockingly violent campaigns to achieve their goals of conquest.”2
When compared to other countries that carried out colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and South America, the United States was not exceptional in the sheer amount of violence it imposed to achieve sovereignty over the territories it appropriated. The British colonizations of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were equally genocidal. Extreme violence, particularly against unarmed families and communities, was an inherent aspect of European colonialism, always with genocidal possibilities, and often with genocidal results. What distinguishes the U.S. experience is not the amount or type of violence involved, but rather the historical narratives attached to that violence and their political uses, even today. From the first settlement, appropriating land from its stewards became a racialized war, “civilization” against “savagery,” and thereby was inherently genocidal. In the words of historian Richard Slotkin, “‘Savage war’ was distinguished from ‘civilized warfare’ in its lack of limitations on the extent of violence, and of laws for its application. The doctrine of ‘savage war’ depended on the belief that certain races are inherently disposed to cruel and atrocious violence. Similar assumptions had often operated in the wars of Christian or crusading states against the Muslims in Europe and the Holy Land, and massacre had often enough accompanied such wars.”3
Military historian John Grenier offers an indispensable analysis of the white colonists’ warfare against the Indigenous peoples of North America. The way of war largely devised and enacted by settlers formed the basis for the founding ideology and colonialist military strategy of the independent United States, and this approach to war is still being practiced almost as a reflex in the twenty-first century.4
Grenier explains that he began his study after September 11, 2001, in the wake of the U.S. reversion to irregular warfare—savage warfare—in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, his goal to trace the historical roots of U.S. use of unlimited war as an attempt to destroy the collective will of enemy people, or their capacity to resist, employing any means necessary but mainly by attacking civilians and their support systems, such as their food supply. Today called “special operations” or “low-intensity conflict,” that kind of warfare was first used against Indigenous communities by colonial militias in the first British colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts. Those irregular forces, made up of landed settlers, sought to disrupt every aspect of resistance as well as to obtain intelligence through scouting and taking prisoners. They did so by destroying Indigenous villages and fields and intimidating and slaughtering unarmed women, children, and elders.5 These voluntary fighting crews made up of individual civilians—“rangers”—are the groups referenced as militias, as they came to be called, in the Second Amendment.
Grenier analyzes the development of the U.S. way of war from 1607 to 1814, during which all the architecture of the U.S. military was forged, leading to its extension and development into the present. Esteemed U.S. historian Bernard Bailyn labeled the period “barbarous,” but Bailyn, like most of his fellow U.S. historians, portrays the Indigenous defenders of their homelands as “marauders” that the European settlers needed to get rid of.6 From this formative period, Grenier argues, emerged problematic characteristics of the U.S. way of war and thereby the characteristics of its civilization, which few historians have come to terms with and many, such as Bailyn, justify as necessary.
During the late seventeenth century, Anglo settlers in New England began the routine practice of scalp hunting and “ranging.” By that time, the non-Indigenous population of the British colony in North America had increased sixfold, to more than 150,000 people, which meant that settlers were intruding on more of the Indigenous farmlands and fishing resources. Indigenous resistance followed in what the settlers called “King Philip’s War.” Wampanoag people and their Indigenous allies attacked the settlers’ isolated farms, using a method that relied on speed and caution in striking and retreating, and possessing of course a perfect knowledge of the terrain and climate.
The settlers scorned this kind of resistance as “skulking,” and responded by destroying Indigenous villages and everyone in them who could not escape, burning their fields and food storage. But as effective Indigenous resistance continued, the commander of the Plymouth militia, Benjamin Church, studied Wampanoag tactics in order to develop a more effective kind of preemption or counterinsurgency. He petitioned the colony’s governor for permission to choose sixty to seventy settlers to serve as scouts, as he called them, for what he termed “wilderness warfare,” although they were attacking developed Indigenous villages and fields. In July 1676, the first settler-organized militia was the result. The rangers’ force was made up of sixty male settlers and 140 already conquered Indigenous men. They were ordered to “discover, pursue, fight, surprise, destroy, or subdue” the enemy, in Church’s words. The inclusion of Indigenous fighters on the colonists’ side was not unique to British colonists in North America; rather, the practice has marked the character of European colonization and occupations of non-European peoples from the beginning. The settler-rangers could learn from their Native aides, then discard them. In the following two decades, Church perfected his evolving methods of annihilation, and those methods spread as more colonies were established.7
The Native people of New England continued to fight back by burning British settlements and killing settlers or capturing them for ransom. As an incentive to recruit fighters,
