News From Barbaria: The Origin Of White Supremacy: "An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States"

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Many thanks to daughter Maria for introducing me to "An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States."
Last Christmas she gave me her own copy.

Here is American History Professor Robin D. G. Kelley's (UCLA) summary description of "An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States."
"This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime."

"An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States"

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Winner of the 2015 "American Book Award"

Autobiographical Sketch
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

"As a student of history, having completed a master's degree and Ph.D. in the discipline, I am grateful for all I learned from my professors and from the thousands of text I studied. But I did not gain the perspective presented in this book from those professors or studies. This came from outside the academy.

My mother was part Indian, most likely Cherokee, born in Joplin, Missouri. Unenrolled and orphaned, having lost her mother to tuberculosis at age four and with an Irish father who was itinerant and alcoholic, she grew up neglected and often homeless along with a brother. Picked up by authorities on the streets of Harrah, Oklahoma, the town to which their father had relocated the family, she was placed in foster homes where she was abused, expected to be a servant, and would run away. When she was 16, she met and married my father, of Scots-Irish settler heritage, 18, and a high school dropout who worked as a cowboy on a sprawling cattle ranch in the Osage Nation. I was the last of their 4 children. As a sharecropper family in Canadian County, Oklahoma, we moved from one cabin to another. I grew up in the midst of rural, Native communities in the former treaty territory of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations that had been allotted and opened to settlers in the late 19th century. Nearby was the federal Indian boarding school at Concho. Strict segregation ruled among the Black, white, and Indian towns, churches, and schools in Oklahoma, and I had little interchange with Native people. My mother was ashamed of being part Indian. She died of alcoholism...

... In my own political and intellectual development studying colonialism and imperialism in Africa and the Americas and supporting national liberation movements, I found a kindred soul in 1975 when I met Howard Adams (1922-2001). Howard was a Métis political leader from rural Saskatchewan, a Marxist, and professor of Native American studies at UC Davis, recruited by Jack Forbes. Howard was the first academic I had met who had grown up as poor as I had, about which we had many conversations. His heartrending and elegant 1975 memoir -history of the Métis and their great leader Louis Riel, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, now a classic, became a template for my own research and writing."

"An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States"

Excerpt

"The Crusades gave birth to the papal law of limpieza de sangre - cleanliness of blood - for which the Inquisition was estabished by the Church to investigate and determine. Before this time the concept of biolgical race based on "blood" is not known to have existed as law or taboo in Christian Europe or anyone else in the world. As scapegoating and suspicion of Conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity) and Moriscos (Muslims who had converted to Christianity) intensified over several centuries in Christian-controlled Spain, the doctrine of limpieza de sangre was popularized. It had the effect of granting psychological and increasingly legal privileges to "Old Christians," both rich and poor, thus obscuring the class differences between the landed aristocracy and land-poor peasants and shepherds. Whtever their economic station, the "old Christian" Spanish were enabled to identify with the nobility. As one Spanish historian put it, "The common people looked upwards, wishing and hoping to climb, and let themeselves be seduced by chivalric ideals: honour, dignity, glory, and the noble life." Lope de Vega, a sixteenth-century contemporary of Cervantes, wrote: "Soy un homre, / aunque de villana casta, / limpio de sangre y jamas / de hebrea o mora mancada." (I am a man, although of lowly status, yet clean of blood and with no mixture of Jewish or Moorish blood). (Alan: Here is my more literal translation of this passage: "I am a man, and although of villager caste, I am of clean blood, which has never been stained with Jewish of Moorish blood.")

This cross-class mind-set can be found as well in the stance of descendants of the old settlers of British colonization in North America. This then is the first instance of class leveling based on imagined racial sameness - the origin of white supremacy, the essential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa. As Ellie Wiesel famously observed, the road to Auschwitz was paved in the earliest days of Christendom. Historian David Stannard, in American Holocaust, adds the caveat that the same road led straight through the heart of America. The ideology of white supremacy was paramount in neutralizing the class antagonisms of the landless against the landed and distributing confiscated lands and properties of Moors and Jews In Iberia, of the Irish in Ulster, and of Native American and African peoples."

Alan: The ability of blood-based bias to unite the interests of "the landed" with the interests of "the landless" is currently reflected in the "common cause" binding hardscrabble poor whites to bubble-dwelling Donald Trump, a billionaire plutocrat with a predilection for gold-plated toilet seats.

"Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States"

reviewed by the Zinn Education Project

https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/indigenous-peoples-history-of-the-us/

Excerpt, Chapter 4, "Bloody Footprints":

"Indigenous people continued to resist by burning settlements and killing and capturing settlers. As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations. During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670’s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.

Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.” Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.

This way of war, forged in the first century of colonization – destroying Indigenous villages and fields, killing civilians, ranging and scalp hunting – became the basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent into the late nineteenth century."