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Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America

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Mention “ethnic cleansing” and most Americans are likely to think of “sectarian” or “tribal” conflict in some far-off locale plagued by unstable or corrupt government. According to historian Gary Clayton Anderson, however, the United States has its own legacy of ethnic cleansing, and it involves American Indians.

In Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian, Anderson uses ethnic cleansing as an analytical tool to challenge the alluring idea that Anglo-American colonialism in the New World constituted genocide. Beginning with the era of European conquest, Anderson employs definitions of ethnic cleansing developed by the United Nations and the International Criminal Court to reassess key moments in the Anglo-American dispossession of American Indians.

Euro-Americans’ extensive use of violence against Native peoples is well documented. Yet Anderson argues that the inevitable goal of colonialism and U.S. Indian policy was not to exterminate a population, but to obtain land and resources from the Native peoples recognized as having legitimate possession. The clashes between Indians, settlers, and colonial and U.S. governments, and subsequent dispossession and forcible migration of Natives, fit the modern definition of ethnic cleansing.

To support the case for ethnic cleansing over genocide, Anderson begins with English conquerors’ desire to push Native peoples to the margin of settlement, a violent project restrained by the Enlightenment belief that all humans possess a “natural right” to life. Ethnic cleansing comes into greater analytical focus as Anderson engages every major period of British and U.S. Indian policy, especially armed conflict on the American frontier where government soldiers and citizen militias alike committed acts that would be considered war crimes today.

Drawing on a lifetime of research and thought about U.S.-Indian relations, Anderson analyzes the Jacksonian “Removal” policy, the gold rush in California, the dispossession of Oregon Natives, boarding schools and other “benevolent” forms of ethnic cleansing, and land allotment. Although not amounting to genocide, ethnic cleansing nevertheless encompassed a host of actions that would be deemed criminal today, all of which had long-lasting consequences for Native peoples.

ISBN-13: 9780806151748

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Publication Date: 07-01-2015

Pages: 476

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

Gary Clayton Anderson, George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma , is author of The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875. His book The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention won the Angie Debo Prize and the publication award from the San Antonio Conservation Society.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Definitions of Genocide, Crimes against Humanity, Ethnic Cleansing, and War Crimes in Modern World History 3

1 The Native New World 23

2 European Penetration of the New World 36

3 Interregnum: Natives and a Reformed Colonial Land Policy 52

4 A New Kind of Ethnic Cleansing: The Frontier "Rangers" and the Assault on Native America 69

5 The American Invasion 87

6 The Jeffersonians and the Removal Game 110

7 The Great Land Grab 128

8 Unscabbarding the Bayonet: Andrew Jackson and the Policy of Forced Ethnic Cleansing 151

9 The Western Domain: Indian Country 173

10 The Stealing of a Golden Land: Ethnic Cleansing in California 192

11 The "Diminishment" of the Native Domain: Oregon and Washington 219

12 The Great Plains: War Crimes, Reservations, Peace Commissions, and Reformers 237

13 The "Peace Policy": Benevolent Ethnic Cleansing 258

14 The Red River "Wars": The Collapse of the Peace Policy 274

15 General Sheridan and the Ethnic Cleansing of the Northern Lakota Sioux 289

16 The Indians' "Last Stand" against Ethnic Cleansing 310

Epilogue: Allotment and the Final Ethnic Cleansing of America 329

Notes 339

Bibliography 411

Index 435