reminiscent of Wounded Knee in 1973, with chemical weapons, concussion grenades, so-called rubber bullets, LRAD sound devices, and water cannons unleashed on unarmed opponents of the pipeline construction.75 The settler state has never acknowledged any limitations when responding to Indigenous resistance. In 1792 Thomas Jefferson opined that “the native possessors” had “no right of soil” with respect to “a white nation settling down and declaring that such and such are their limits.”76 Some 225 years later, this characterization echoed in the Army Corps of Engineers’ demand that Standing Rock water protectors retreat to the reservation, and its pretense that “to protect the general public” it was “necessary” to treat those who remained on unceded treaty lands as “trespassers” subject to forcible removal and criminal prosecution.77
Strategies of Displacement and Containment
The American settlers’ presumed colonial prerogative extends not only to determining who may live within the state’s claimed boundaries, but also where they are allowed to be. Throughout US history various forms of removal, relocation, incarceration, and exclusion have been utilized to maximize settler landownership, ensure its profitability, and maintain social control. As the American Indian population base, along with its ability to effectively defend itself, was reduced to the point where complete physical elimination no longer made economic or military sense to the settlers, they “cleared” coveted territories by removing the remaining Indigenous populations to what were considered, at that time, the least desirable lands. These removals met with considerable resistance, and the military often was deployed to forcibly transfer peoples and to prevent them from leaving their assigned locales.
Forced Removals
By 1801 Thomas Jefferson was already predicting that “our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . [to] cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws,” a vision not to be sullied by “blot or mixture.”78 Between 1790 and 1840 some 4.5 million Euroamerican settlers appropriated lands west of the Appalachians, and by 1850 the United States claimed the Pacific Ocean as its western border. Just forty years later, “North America’s Native peoples would be living mainly on reservations controlled by the US government or in its rapidly growing cities,” their “pre-contact” population and land base reduced by more than 95 percent.79
The terms “removal” and “relocation” are deceptively benign, masking the horrors attending this genocidal process. Between 1813 and 1855 most of the eastern peoples who had not already been coerced into moving west were forcibly removed. The best-known example, of course, is that of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Snatched from their homes at gunpoint, often by settler vigilantes who then burned their houses, the Cherokees were concentrated in military stockades before being force-marched some 1,200 miles from their Georgia/North Carolina homeland to Oklahoma. The Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, as well as numerous smaller nations, were similarly “removed.” Suffering from exhaustion, exposure, starvation, and disease, many nations lost 50 percent or more of their populations as a result.80
Why were these nations so brutally expelled from their traditional lands? Incompatibility of Indigenous and settler lifestyles is often presumed, but at the time of their displacement the Cherokees had signed numerous treaties with the United States protecting their right to remain on their lands, and there were no hostilities occurring.81 They were settled agriculturalists with a sound economic base and political, legal, and social institutions easily recognized as such by the colonizers.82 The real problem may well have been “the Cherokee’s unmistakable aptitude for civilization,”83 for this undermined the settlers’ justifications for seizing coveted lands. As Wolfe observed, the Cherokees’ adoption of settler practices was particularly provocative because it “signified permanence.”84
Internments
Mass incarceration was the inevitable consequence of the “removals.” Recognizing that the Indigenous peoples who survived relocation had to live somewhere, the government assigned them to “agencies,” that is, reservations. The notion of “reserved lands,” like “relocation,” sounds relatively benign; it might not be home, but it is land upon which to start a new life. This is, however, an entirely inaccurate perception. Even under the most humane conditions, forced relocation is devastating, and it has an intensified effect on peoples for whom land is not a fungible commodity. As former UN special rapporteur James Anaya notes, Indigenous peoples “are indigenous because their ancestral roots are embedded in the lands on which they live, or would like to live.”85 Cultures, cosmologies, languages, identities, and responsibilities that have evolved in relation to particular territories cannot simply be transplanted.86 Compounding this problem, virtually all of these peoples were being forced onto the territories of other Indigenous nations, “turn[ing] eastern tribes into proxy invaders of Indian territory across the Mississippi.”87
And, of course, the conditions under which Indigenous peoples were “removed” and “relocated” were anything but humane. Invariably, American Indians were confined to the poorest and least hospitable lands available, a significant problem even when their assigned reservations were located within their traditional territories. Thus, a Chiricahua Apache described the San Carlos reservation as “the worst place in all the great territory stolen from the Apaches. If anybody had ever lived there permanently, no Apache knew of it.”88 The government’s failure to provide adequate food or shelter dramatically intensified the trauma of forced relocation and triggered the rapid decline of already decimated populations.89 Trapped on barren lands without adequate food or shelter, survival seemed unlikely, prompting many interned peoples to attempt escape. But they were prisoners, allowed to leave their assigned agencies only with the permission of the military or a federal Indian agent,90 and fleeing provided the state with an excuse to revert to wholesale slaughter.
The Northern Cheyennes, for example, had been forced from their traditional Montana territory in 1877 and imprisoned in Oklahoma. By the fall of 1878, with their people dying of malaria, dysentery, and other illnesses, some three hundred Cheyennes made a desperate attempt to go home.91 Hoping to deter other escapes, General Philip Sheridan sent about fifteen thousand US troops in pursuit, with orders to “spare no measure . . . to kill or capture” the small group of escapees.92 The Cheyennes were incarcerated at Camp Robinson, Nebraska, where the government denied them food and firewood in the dead of winter to coerce them into returning to Oklahoma. In January 1879 the Cheyennes again escaped but were quickly tracked down, and about half their number, children included, were simply butchered.93 There could be no mistaking the message conveyed by such practices: American Indians had no alternative but to remain in their assigned locations, under whatever conditions the settler state chose to impose.
Within the settler imaginary that invented and asserted an exclusive entitlement to the land, Indians were, by definition, a military threat. This construction was not merely theoretical or rhetorical but enshrined in law and enforced by the police powers of the state well into the twentieth century.94 The experiences of the Chiricahua Apache illustrate this aptly. Finding their confinement at San Carlos intolerable, Geronimo’s band escaped and eluded government forces for a year and a half. In retaliation, following his 1886 surrender, the government shipped the entire Chiricahua population—children, elders, women, and even men who had fought for the United States—to military prisons in Florida and then Alabama. During their first eight years of incarceration, some 40 percent of the imprisoned Chiricahuas died, and it was not until the winter of 1913–14 that the survivors were transferred to a reservation in Oklahoma.95
Citing the expropriation of their lands and their lengthy imprisonment, in 1947 the Chiricahuas filed a claim with the Indian Claims Commission (ICC), a body established by the federal government in 1946 in an attempt to distinguish its territorial acquisitions from those of the Germans it was then prosecuting at Nuremberg.96 In 1971 the ICC finally
