euro-nationalist
05-02-2009, 01:03 AM
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Red Man vs White Man: The Seventh Great Race War
THERE HAVE BEEN EIGHT MAJOR RACIAL WARS involving the white race. The first six were: with Attila and his Huns, A.D. 372-454; the crusades, the Moorish invasion of Spain; the trouble with the Bulgars, Avars, Magyars and Khazars; then Genghis Khan and his Mongols; then the Ottoman genocide. The era of the Indian wars was an age when the very survival of settlers was at stake. They were being slaughtered, enslaved and mutilated in the most barbaric manner. The author of this piece is the distinguished creator of The March of the Titans, available from TBR. The following is from Chapter 50 of that monumental book.
BY ARTHUR KEMP
THE SEVENTH GREAT RACE WAR in which whites found themselves embroiled was with the American Indians. Despite scalpings and other atrocities, it was a struggle that ultimately ended in victory, seeing the originally Atlantic-based United States of America extend its borders to the Pacific Ocean.
The invasion of North America by the whites, in a manner so markedly similar to those of the Indo-European invasions of Europe and other parts of the world thousands of years before, caused natural dissent from the inhabitants in the new territories.
Unlike the ancient Indo-Europeans, however, the Amerinds of America were not of distantly related genetic stock, as were the Old Europeans: they were mostly of Mongoloid racial stock, only called “Indians” because the first white explorers were looking for India; and only called “red” because of their habit of wearing red clay as face paint.
The first meetings of whites in North America and Amerinds was mixed: generally the Amerinds were in awe of the technological wonders the whites brought with them—starting with the ships themselves, which, with their billowing sails appeared like great spirits on the horizon: more than one instance is recorded of Amerinds fleeing in panic at the very sight of a white explorer ship. If they were in awe of the ships themselves, it needs no imagination to perceive what they must have thought of the other wonders from the white world: clothes, steel, guns, mirrors, jewelry, copper, brass kettles and thousands of other things completely unknown to the native peoples of North America.
Later the whites were to introduce yet another wonder to North America that was seized upon and used to great effect by the Amerinds: horses. The first horses were introduced to the continent by the Spanish: somehow a number escaped and by natural breeding formed large packs of wild horses, which roamed the plains of America.
Finally, the new arrivals were not only light to sallow complexioned, but many of them also had beards, and they all grew facial hair. This in itself was a subject of wonder by the Amerinds, who in their pure racial form did not grow whiskers at all, like their cousins across the Bering Strait in Asia.
In turn, the Amerinds presented the white world with many new vegetables, as well as tobacco, coca, cacao and venereal disease—the rapid transmission of the latter disease back to Europe from South America serves as a graphic illustration of the levels of physical integration which took place on that continent, starting shortly after the Spanish and Portuguese first landed there.
However, the two traits for which the Amerinds became known—and for which they also became particularly disliked—were:
• The practice common amongst all the tribes of North America of cutting off the scalps of their vanquished foes to take as trophies for display in the tribal village. The appearance of white scalps—with blond, red or brown hair—was particularly prized, being outstanding compared to the pitch black haired scalps the Amerinds were more normally used to taking from one another; and
• In common with their racial cousins in Central and South America, cannibalism was common. The full extent of these practices was noted by many early writers, with the most complete and detailed account of Amerind cannibalism and the habit of torturing white prisoners of both sexes appearing in print in 1892 in The Works of Francis Parkman, published by Little Brown, Boston (Vol. III).
The term cannibalism is derived from Canibales, the Spanish name for the man-eating Caribbean Amerinds who lived in the West Indies when Christopher Columbus arrived. The habit had clearly come across the Bering Straits when the Mongolian ancestors of the Amerinds had crossed into the Americas: in medieval times the Italian traveler Marco Polo reported that tribes from Tibet to Sumatra practiced cannibalism.
For the sake of political correctness, these disturbing traits are for the greatest part suppressed in modern histories of the Amerinds: but at the time they were well-known and feared by the white settlers; going a long way to explaining the extended period of conflict between the whites and the Amerinds, and the particularly ruthless methods of dealing with each other if captured.
Eventually the more extreme white frontiersmen started retaliating against the practice of scalping by exacting the same punishment on the Amerinds—but there are no recorded incidents of whites ever quite getting around to duplicating the cannibalistic habit of eating dead Amerinds, even though there are many recorded incidents of the Indians eating whites.
AMERINDS ATTACK WHITE SETTLERS
The initial friendly contact soon gave way when the Amerinds realized whites were arriving as settlers. From the time of the very first white settlements, even going back to the Viking landings in Newfoundland, the pioneers were subjected to attacks by resentful Amerind tribes, who realized that the whites represented a serious threat to their way of life, and tried their best to drive the settlers back into the sea.
In fact the very first English settlement in North America, a 117-strong group of white pioneers, situated on an island off the coast of North Carolina, was probably wiped out by an Amerind attack. Called the “lost colony,” they were destroyed sometime between 1587 and 1590. Their remains were never found, which would have been the case had they starved to death or met some other natural end. Some people claim a few of the whites escaped to Croatoan Island and their ancestors intermixed with friendlier Indians.
In Virginia, the first successful English colony, which was established in 1607, was subjected to repeated attacks by the Powhatan tribe, which culminated in 1622, when 350 whites were killed by the Amerinds in a single attack. As there were only just over 1,000 whites in the colony at the time, this reduced the entire white population by one-third.
In April 1644, another attack by the Powhatan killed 500 more whites: this very nearly destroyed the colony. Incensed, the surviving whites set out to exact retribution. A short vicious campaign followed, which saw the Amerind tribes wilt and retreat inland.
BACON’S REBELLION
Bacon’s Rebellion was an uprising in Virginia led by a white farmer, Nathaniel Bacon, against the governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, in 1676. Bacon and a number of fellow white farmers came under renewed Amerind attack. When Berkeley refused to station troops in the outlying areas to protect the whites, Bacon organized a militia and led this substantial army against the Amerinds, inflicting some severe defeats upon them.
Berkeley proclaimed Bacon a traitor because he had broken the law by illegally raising an army. Bacon then marched on the capital, Jamestown, with his militia in tow and seized control of the colonial government. Berkeley gathered together a force of loyal colonists and started amini-civil war in the colony. It ended the same year it started, 1676, with Bacon’s death.
The creation of the colony of New England was also met with violent resistance. In 1675 the Amerind leader, Metacom, led a guerrilla war against the whites until he was betrayed by one of his people and executed: in the interim he had exacted a heavy toll in white settlers’ lives.
The first Dutch settlement in North America, in the area now divided between New York and Manhattan Island, was, according to the popular story, purchased from Amerinds for $24 worth of goods in 1626. Despite whatever transaction may have taken place—and the lack of understanding of the concept of private ownership of land by the Amerinds probably made whatever agreement which was made, meaningless to the natives—Amerind attacks on the whites in the area fast became the norm and never fully subsided until the continuing buildup of white settlers saw the surviving Amerinds drift into the interior.
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1763—RESTRICTED WHITE SETTLEMENT
As the numbers of whites increased exponentially on the Eastern Seaboard of America, so the Amerinds settled in ever greater numbers in the middle of the continent, sometimes moving there as part of a natural migration, other times fleeing bands of avenging white militia. A particularly nasty white/Amerind conflict (sparked off by the Ottawa tribe, whose chief’s name was Pontiac) caused the British authorities in the colonies to issue a Proclamation of 1763, which restricted white settlement to the area east of the Appalachian Mountains. This was done in an attempt to prevent new race wars from breaking out.
By the time the 13 Colonies—which made up less than one-third of the territory that the United States of America was eventually to encompass—had declared independence from Britain, the vast majority of Amerinds were on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains, away from the white settlers and their colonies.
When the American War for Independence broke out in 1775, the vast majority of the Iroquois Amerinds actively sided with the British. In the south the Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek Amerinds seized the opportunity to launch a series of attacks on the white colonists, becoming formally allied to the British shortly thereafter.
The American revolutionaries then had to put down these Amerind uprisings and fight the British at the same time, something that for a while seriously divided the Americans’ fighting forces, although they were ultimately successful in this aim.
When independence was finally won from the British, the participation of the Amerinds in the anti-revolutionary campaign served to confirm the opinion of the new white nation that the Amerinds were irreparably hostile.
Thus it was that the American Constitution, accepted by the 13 former Colonies shortly after independence had been won, included the regulation of relations with the Amerinds under the clause of the Constitution which dealt with the regulation of relations with foreign states:
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution reads:
“The Congress shall have Power . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”
George Washington and the other original Founding Fathers of the United States therefore had not the slightest intention of ever including the Amerinds into their republic, classing them as outside aliens along with other “foreign nations.”
After the end of the American Revolution, white numbers in America continued to grow. Soon the desire for new farming land saw white settlers start to fan out westward, moving into the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
In all of these regions lived large numbers of Amerind tribes, many of whom had been there before the whites had first started settling in North America. Once again the scenario which had played itself out along the East coast occurred: small white settlements were attacked by the Amerinds; as the number of whites increased, successfully warding off and then beating the Amerinds became possible.
This time, however—and this would set the pattern right up until the last great Amerind-white race war in the late 19th century—the Amerinds had absorbed some of the white innovations, in particular the gun and the horse, both of which the Amerinds had obtained from traders or from raids on settlers. Armed and mobile, the Amerinds of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee proved harder to beat. A white army dispatched to deal with the situation was badly defeated by the Amerinds near what is now Fort Wayne in Indiana.
Finally, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 in northwestern Ohio, a white American punitive force, sent to avenge a particularly nasty series of Amerind attacks, decisively defeated the natives. A treaty between the races, the Treaty of Greenville, established a definite boundary between what was designated “Indian Territory” and the white settlement area.
THE TRADE AND INTERCOURSE ACTS
Despite the prevailing view among all white Americans of the Amerinds as being a particularly savage people, there was a desire to ensure that their lack of sophistication was not exploited by unscrupulous white traders or frontiersmen, of whom there were a small minority. So it was that the Trade and Intercourse Acts, a series of laws passed by the U.S. Congress at the end of the 18th century, attempted to regulate trading practices with the Amerinds. Among the measures were provisions allowing for the punishment of traders found to be defrauding the Amerinds.
The white frontiersmen in the Ohio River valley relived the terror and anxiety of the first white settlers on the Eastern Seaboard: subjected to intermittent and unexpected attacks, they were forced to be constantly on their guard and soon became used to the rugged demands of life spent part at war and part at creating, from scratch, entire towns and farms.
This state of affairs helped to create what later became known as the “manifest destiny” syndrome: the frontiersmen began to regard it as almost their sacred duty to wrest land away from the Amerinds and open it to white settlement. They saw the Amerinds as a savage race under whom the rich continent had lain idle for thousands of years. It was up to the frontiersmen to settle it and to break the sod.
This belief in an ordained destiny to bring civilization to the interior of the continent was fed by the cruelty of the ongoing conflicts with the Amerinds. Daily the frontiersmen had to deal with unspeakable Indian brutalities which reinforced their belief in their own cultural superiority.
This attitude was, however, opposed by a small but growing group of whites on the now established and relatively easy living eastern seaboard who were not exposed to the dangers, violence and rigors of life at the frontier: this was the start of a split in the White population in America that would ultimately become associated with the issue of slavery and racial conflict, leading up to the American Civil War of 1861-1865.
During the American-British War of 1812, the Shawnee Amerinds sided with Britain, partly as a result of having suffered a defeat at the hands of an American force at the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana. The Shawnee had long been receiving aid from British North America, or Canada, and this alliance was one of the causes of the outbreak of the war between America and Britain. The great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, a man opposed to unnecessary acts of cruelty, was, however, killed when the American revolutionaries defeated a combined British and Shawnee force at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813.
WHITES EATEN BY AMERINDS AT FORT MIMS
In Alabama, the Creek Amerinds seized Fort Mims in 1812, cruelly massacring all the white inhabitants—men, women and children—and then engaging in a cannibalistic orgy on the remains of all the whites they could find in the settlement.
Shocked, an avenging white army under Andrew Jackson was sent south. After two years of conflict the Creek were finally, decisively defeated at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814. Andrew Jackson then went on to be elected president of the United States in 1828. His first hand experiences with the Amerinds made him turn a deaf ear to the liberals of the East and it was largely as a result of his maneuverings that the next great event in white-Amerind history was to take place in 1830.
INDIANS MOVED WEST OF MISSISSIPPI
By 1830, the numbers of whites in the region between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains—essentially the present day Midwestern states of America—had reached the point where it was no longer possible to efficiently regulate the very often violent interaction between the whites and the Amerinds. In May of that year, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which empowered the president of the United States to move Amerinds west of the Mississippi, to the officially declared “Indian Territory”—and in particular the state now known as Oklahoma.
To the white liberals on the eastern seaboard, the Removal Act was an outrage perpetrated by the same sort of people who owned black slaves, and they opposed it. The Removal Act would become another factor in the political divide among the whites in America.
The original intention as stated in the Removal Act was that the removals were to be voluntary. While the vast majority were indeed peaceful (the Amerinds were as keen to get away from the whites as the whites were to get rid of the Amerinds), a small number were not. These forced removals later became an icon of oppression for the Amerinds.
The Sauk and Fox tribes rebelled in 1832, sparking off the Black Hawk War in Illinois and Wisconsin. This conflict ended in August of that year when the last major group of Sauk warriors was killed by white troopers while they were trying to cross the Mississippi River into Iowa. The circumstances of this battle—in which the Amerinds were caught halfway through the river—resulted in so many fatalities on the Amerind side that it became known as the Bad Axe Massacre.
The Seminole tribe in Florida also resisted violently. The Seminole War followed from 1835 to 1842 which eventually saw this native tribe defeated and rounded up into a reservation against their will. By the mid-1850s, virtually all of the eastern half of America had been cleared of Amerinds, either through voluntary departure or forced removal.
By the middle of the 19th century, the rate of white expansion and settlement into the Midwest and even beyond to the Pacific coast had made the concept of “Indian territory” unsustainable. In an effort to reach a compromise between the demands of the white settlers and the objections of the Amerinds, the concept of “Indian territories” was then changed into “Indian reservations.”
These reservations were smaller in territorial size than the “Indian territories” but as an exchange for accepting the smaller lands, the American government gave the ironclad guarantee that the reservations were exactly that: no whites would ever be able to settle or own land in them and they would be the inalienable property of the various tribes, whose numbers by this stage had dropped from an estimated 850,000 in 1550, to just under 400,000 by the mid-19th century.
As there were only 400,000 Amerinds in the entire North American continent around 1850, the belief that reservations would protect the Amerinds was not far fetched at all, and in real terms the land so set aside for the Amerinds was significant, given the numbers that were under consideration.
The discovery of gold in the western territories in 1849, created a wave of new white settlers in that region. This in turn sparked off attacks by the Amerind tribes who had by now seen what had happened in the east. In Idaho and Oregon, conflicts between white settlers and the Bannock and Shoshone tribes broke out. The same happened in Nevada and Utah, where the Ute fought the settlers. In the southwest, the Apache and Navajo put up the most organized resistance.
In northern California, the settlers were set upon by a vicious Amerind tribe, the Modocs. After a series of attacks, the Modocs finally crossed the line with a particularly bad massacre of whites in 1872. Enraged, the settlers formed a militia, and the Modoc Wars of 1872-1873 followed, which saw the Amerinds in California utterly defeated.
PLAINS WARS
The creation of reservations was part accepted and part rejected by the Amerind tribes. Some immediately accepted the offer of guaranteed protection against further white incursions and either settled in the reservations, or found their already existing lands included into the reservations. However, some of the larger tribes objected and the white-Amerind race war, which had continued in fits and starts ever since the first whites arrived in North America—then entered its conclusive phase in a series of conflicts known as the Plains Wars.
The Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux all fought the settlers as hard as they could. There were countless small localized engagements which saw hundreds, if not eventually thousands, of Amerinds killed, with ferocious fighting taking place over a massive area right through the 1860s and 1870s. The most famous of these engagements, and also the penultimate clash, was the Battle of Little Bighorn.
The Battle of Little Bighorn was fought between a regiment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and a force of Sioux and Cheyenne Amerinds on June 25, 1876, in what is now the state of Montana. Gold had been discovered in the nearby Black Hills in 1874. This had led to the inevitable massive and overnight influx of prospectors into Amerind lands. Immediately the Sioux and Cheyenne chiefs Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Gall organized raiding parties on the white intruders.
By 1876, the 7th Cavalry had been posted to protect the white prospectors. In June of that year, a single regiment—655 men—of the 7th Cavalry advanced on a party in excess of 4,000 Sioux at the junction of the Bighorn and the Little Bighorn rivers.
The soldiers were, it transpired later, unaware of the actual size of the heavily armed Amerind force. Custer realized his error too late. In a desperate attempt to break the Sioux force, he personally led a frontal charge of 260 of his men into the waiting Amerinds. The charge failed and Custer and his tiny force were surrounded. Fighting standing literally back to back with each other, Custer and his soldiers were slowly cut down one by one, and all were killed.
Although this battle was a white defeat, it would be the last. Within a year, follow-up operations by the white armies had crushed the last of the Sioux and Cheyenne resistance; most of the Amerind survivors were then moved to a reservation in Oklahoma.
Isolated clashes then took place in the late 1870s, but by 1880 the conflict had petered out, only flaring up again briefly in 1890.
The Plains Wars came to a final bloody end at the Battle (or massacre) of Wounded Knee in December 1890. Situated inside the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the area was populated by the Sioux Amerinds. In 1889, a Paiute medicine man, Wovoka (“Wood Cutter,” also known as Jack Wilson), began prophesying amongst various tribesmen that if they performed a special dance—the Ghost Dance—long enough, this would result in the return of all of their former lands, the resurrection from the dead of all their ancestors and the death of all the whites. [Wovoka preached non-violence, but two of the Miniconjou, Kicking Bear and Short Bull, differed. They argued for the elimination of whites by violence.–Ed.]
The prophesies spread like wildfire amongst the Sioux, who then not only started performing the ritual dance in large numbers, but also began stockpiling guns and ammunition ready for a rebellion when called upon to rise up by the dead ancestors.
The white government soon became aware of the goings on, and in December 1890, a detachment of the 7th Cavalry arrived in the Pine Ridge Reservation and arrested the Sioux chief, Sitting Bull (the same one who had been instrumental in the clashes which led to the Battle of Little Bighorn), in a move designed to break the rebellion before it started. As he was being led away, a lone Amerind fired a shot at the troopers. A full-scale gunfight then erupted and 13 people were killed, including Sitting Bull. The Sioux then fled to the settlement of a neighboring chief, Big Foot of the Miniconjou band, who was camped near Wounded Knee Creek, with the 7th Cavalry in hot pursuit.
On Dec. 29, 1890, the federal troops entered the Sioux camp at Wounded Knee. A scuffle broke out and then a new gunfight erupted. It has never been established who fired the first shot, with both the Sioux and the whites claiming it was the other side.
The end result was that when the shooting stopped, around 200 Sioux and 31 whites had been killed. About half of the Sioux dead were women and children caught in the crossfire as the gunfight had taken place in the middle of a settlement. This engagement which was half a military operation and half a massacre, was the last of the major white-Amerind conflicts in North America, although Wounded Knee would feature once again in 1973 in another, smaller standoff between the American government and the Sioux.
RACIAL CONSEQUENCES
Apart from the seizure of their land, which was brought about not primarily through military defeat but the simple swamping of that territory by whites (another example of how a change in population causes a change in culture), the Amerind-white wars produced two significant results:
• Firstly, the Amerinds were virtually eliminated as a political, racial and socio-demographic factor; this situation allowed for the final flooding of North America by whites, with all its resultant consequences for world history with the creation of the United States of America;
• Secondly, the subjugation of the Amerinds by masses of whites led to a certain amount of racial mixing between the two groups taking place. But, it being America with its officially endorsed disapproval of racial mixing (which lasted in legal form right into the middle of the 20th century, with anti-miscegenation laws still being on the statute books as late as 1967 in many states) those mixed-race persons born of white-Amerind unions—or indeed of black-Amerind unions, were absorbed into the Amerind population. This is one reason why many Amerinds may look fairer or darker than Mongoloid peoples or may have markedly non-Mongoloid facial features: full-blooded Amerinds are fairly rare.
By the end of the 19th century, the successive wars, rampant alcoholism and natural shrinkage had seen the Amerind population of America drop to an all-time low of 237,000, virtually to the point of complete extinction. [This number was split up into some 2,000 tribes speaking about 296 languages of 29 different language families (and 27 languages that are isolates or unclassified)—Ed.]
The realization dawned that if something were not done, they would disappear completely. In 1871 then, the U.S. Congress decided to abandon the system of treaties with the Amerind tribes and start making laws directly for their preservation—the notion of the Amerinds as being foreign nations was substituted for a policy of wardship, although they were still not granted citizenship of the United States of America.
A new law, the General Allotment Act of 1887, saw a determined effort by the American government to bring the Amerinds into the mainstream of white society. The concept of communally owned tribal lands was abolished, being replaced with individual plots and individual land ownership as was the norm in the rest of the country.
This policy, well intentioned as it was—with the belief that private ownership of land would help lift the Amerinds’ standard of living as this process had with the whites—was a total failure.
Vast numbers of Amerinds simply sold their land as soon as they were given it: sometimes at pathetically low prices, often to unscrupulous land speculators. The result of the General Allotment Act was that the Amerinds succeeded only in losing much of their tribal land without showing any benefit in return.
CITIZENSHIP GRANTED TO AMERINDS
A series of chaotic and contradictory policies toward the Amerinds was then pursued by successive American governments, all of them ultimately failing in their aim of forcing the Amerinds into mainstream society. During the course of these policies, the Amerinds were finally granted American citizenship in 1924—some 145 years after the United States of America had been created.
Finally it was acknowledged that the Indian allotment policy was a disaster, and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 saw the policy abandoned, along with the forced-integration policy. Amerind tribal lands lost during the allotment era were repurchased by the American government and the tribes were encouraged to set up their own governments in the restored semi-independent regions. A credit program on very generous terms was set up, backed by the government, to lend money to Amerinds to re-establish their societies.
This policy continued until after the end of World War II, when another change in policy occurred: Arguments were raised against the preferential treatment in terms of jobs and federal government credit, saying that Amerinds should be treated like any other people in America. Thus by 1953, the federal government undertook to slowly dismantle its bodies and institutions devoted to dealing with the Amerinds as a separate racial group.
Despite this, the U.S. government has to the present day maintained an army of civil servants— in excess of 16,000—in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (mostly Amerinds who are still hired on a preferential treatment basis).
The Amerind population has, through a process of natural increase and absorption of a significant number of whites, gradually increased: by the end of the 20th century, it stood at over 2 million, the highest number ever in that group’s entire existence.1 In spite of the gradual increase in the standard of living and education amongst the Amerinds, they still remain at the very bottom of the social scale in modern America.
This causes isolated outbreaks of violence, including a famous 1973 incident at the site of the Wounded Knee incident. However (for the greatest part) the Amerinds, who once were the most significant threat to the settlement of North America by the whites, are destined never to be a major factor in American society again.
ENDNOTES:
1 Some authorities, however, dispute this and claim there may once have been, in pre-Columbian times, an estimated 12 million North American Indians.—Ed.
ARTHUR KEMP is the Rhodesian-born author of March of the Titans: A History of the White Race (available from TBR for $42).He worked at the South African Conservative Party’s head office on their weekly newspaper, and authored the main “Vote No” party literature used in the 1992 referendum, which made him the single largest distributed author in South African political history. He also worked as political secretary to the leader of the Conservative Party, Dr. Treurnicht, but was expelled from the party in 1993 for advocating the rejection of apartheid in favor of an Afrikaner homeland policy.
http://www.barnesreview.org/html/may2009lead_123.html
Red Man vs White Man: The Seventh Great Race War
THERE HAVE BEEN EIGHT MAJOR RACIAL WARS involving the white race. The first six were: with Attila and his Huns, A.D. 372-454; the crusades, the Moorish invasion of Spain; the trouble with the Bulgars, Avars, Magyars and Khazars; then Genghis Khan and his Mongols; then the Ottoman genocide. The era of the Indian wars was an age when the very survival of settlers was at stake. They were being slaughtered, enslaved and mutilated in the most barbaric manner. The author of this piece is the distinguished creator of The March of the Titans, available from TBR. The following is from Chapter 50 of that monumental book.
BY ARTHUR KEMP
THE SEVENTH GREAT RACE WAR in which whites found themselves embroiled was with the American Indians. Despite scalpings and other atrocities, it was a struggle that ultimately ended in victory, seeing the originally Atlantic-based United States of America extend its borders to the Pacific Ocean.
The invasion of North America by the whites, in a manner so markedly similar to those of the Indo-European invasions of Europe and other parts of the world thousands of years before, caused natural dissent from the inhabitants in the new territories.
Unlike the ancient Indo-Europeans, however, the Amerinds of America were not of distantly related genetic stock, as were the Old Europeans: they were mostly of Mongoloid racial stock, only called “Indians” because the first white explorers were looking for India; and only called “red” because of their habit of wearing red clay as face paint.
The first meetings of whites in North America and Amerinds was mixed: generally the Amerinds were in awe of the technological wonders the whites brought with them—starting with the ships themselves, which, with their billowing sails appeared like great spirits on the horizon: more than one instance is recorded of Amerinds fleeing in panic at the very sight of a white explorer ship. If they were in awe of the ships themselves, it needs no imagination to perceive what they must have thought of the other wonders from the white world: clothes, steel, guns, mirrors, jewelry, copper, brass kettles and thousands of other things completely unknown to the native peoples of North America.
Later the whites were to introduce yet another wonder to North America that was seized upon and used to great effect by the Amerinds: horses. The first horses were introduced to the continent by the Spanish: somehow a number escaped and by natural breeding formed large packs of wild horses, which roamed the plains of America.
Finally, the new arrivals were not only light to sallow complexioned, but many of them also had beards, and they all grew facial hair. This in itself was a subject of wonder by the Amerinds, who in their pure racial form did not grow whiskers at all, like their cousins across the Bering Strait in Asia.
In turn, the Amerinds presented the white world with many new vegetables, as well as tobacco, coca, cacao and venereal disease—the rapid transmission of the latter disease back to Europe from South America serves as a graphic illustration of the levels of physical integration which took place on that continent, starting shortly after the Spanish and Portuguese first landed there.
However, the two traits for which the Amerinds became known—and for which they also became particularly disliked—were:
• The practice common amongst all the tribes of North America of cutting off the scalps of their vanquished foes to take as trophies for display in the tribal village. The appearance of white scalps—with blond, red or brown hair—was particularly prized, being outstanding compared to the pitch black haired scalps the Amerinds were more normally used to taking from one another; and
• In common with their racial cousins in Central and South America, cannibalism was common. The full extent of these practices was noted by many early writers, with the most complete and detailed account of Amerind cannibalism and the habit of torturing white prisoners of both sexes appearing in print in 1892 in The Works of Francis Parkman, published by Little Brown, Boston (Vol. III).
The term cannibalism is derived from Canibales, the Spanish name for the man-eating Caribbean Amerinds who lived in the West Indies when Christopher Columbus arrived. The habit had clearly come across the Bering Straits when the Mongolian ancestors of the Amerinds had crossed into the Americas: in medieval times the Italian traveler Marco Polo reported that tribes from Tibet to Sumatra practiced cannibalism.
For the sake of political correctness, these disturbing traits are for the greatest part suppressed in modern histories of the Amerinds: but at the time they were well-known and feared by the white settlers; going a long way to explaining the extended period of conflict between the whites and the Amerinds, and the particularly ruthless methods of dealing with each other if captured.
Eventually the more extreme white frontiersmen started retaliating against the practice of scalping by exacting the same punishment on the Amerinds—but there are no recorded incidents of whites ever quite getting around to duplicating the cannibalistic habit of eating dead Amerinds, even though there are many recorded incidents of the Indians eating whites.
AMERINDS ATTACK WHITE SETTLERS
The initial friendly contact soon gave way when the Amerinds realized whites were arriving as settlers. From the time of the very first white settlements, even going back to the Viking landings in Newfoundland, the pioneers were subjected to attacks by resentful Amerind tribes, who realized that the whites represented a serious threat to their way of life, and tried their best to drive the settlers back into the sea.
In fact the very first English settlement in North America, a 117-strong group of white pioneers, situated on an island off the coast of North Carolina, was probably wiped out by an Amerind attack. Called the “lost colony,” they were destroyed sometime between 1587 and 1590. Their remains were never found, which would have been the case had they starved to death or met some other natural end. Some people claim a few of the whites escaped to Croatoan Island and their ancestors intermixed with friendlier Indians.
In Virginia, the first successful English colony, which was established in 1607, was subjected to repeated attacks by the Powhatan tribe, which culminated in 1622, when 350 whites were killed by the Amerinds in a single attack. As there were only just over 1,000 whites in the colony at the time, this reduced the entire white population by one-third.
In April 1644, another attack by the Powhatan killed 500 more whites: this very nearly destroyed the colony. Incensed, the surviving whites set out to exact retribution. A short vicious campaign followed, which saw the Amerind tribes wilt and retreat inland.
BACON’S REBELLION
Bacon’s Rebellion was an uprising in Virginia led by a white farmer, Nathaniel Bacon, against the governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, in 1676. Bacon and a number of fellow white farmers came under renewed Amerind attack. When Berkeley refused to station troops in the outlying areas to protect the whites, Bacon organized a militia and led this substantial army against the Amerinds, inflicting some severe defeats upon them.
Berkeley proclaimed Bacon a traitor because he had broken the law by illegally raising an army. Bacon then marched on the capital, Jamestown, with his militia in tow and seized control of the colonial government. Berkeley gathered together a force of loyal colonists and started amini-civil war in the colony. It ended the same year it started, 1676, with Bacon’s death.
The creation of the colony of New England was also met with violent resistance. In 1675 the Amerind leader, Metacom, led a guerrilla war against the whites until he was betrayed by one of his people and executed: in the interim he had exacted a heavy toll in white settlers’ lives.
The first Dutch settlement in North America, in the area now divided between New York and Manhattan Island, was, according to the popular story, purchased from Amerinds for $24 worth of goods in 1626. Despite whatever transaction may have taken place—and the lack of understanding of the concept of private ownership of land by the Amerinds probably made whatever agreement which was made, meaningless to the natives—Amerind attacks on the whites in the area fast became the norm and never fully subsided until the continuing buildup of white settlers saw the surviving Amerinds drift into the interior.
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1763—RESTRICTED WHITE SETTLEMENT
As the numbers of whites increased exponentially on the Eastern Seaboard of America, so the Amerinds settled in ever greater numbers in the middle of the continent, sometimes moving there as part of a natural migration, other times fleeing bands of avenging white militia. A particularly nasty white/Amerind conflict (sparked off by the Ottawa tribe, whose chief’s name was Pontiac) caused the British authorities in the colonies to issue a Proclamation of 1763, which restricted white settlement to the area east of the Appalachian Mountains. This was done in an attempt to prevent new race wars from breaking out.
By the time the 13 Colonies—which made up less than one-third of the territory that the United States of America was eventually to encompass—had declared independence from Britain, the vast majority of Amerinds were on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains, away from the white settlers and their colonies.
When the American War for Independence broke out in 1775, the vast majority of the Iroquois Amerinds actively sided with the British. In the south the Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek Amerinds seized the opportunity to launch a series of attacks on the white colonists, becoming formally allied to the British shortly thereafter.
The American revolutionaries then had to put down these Amerind uprisings and fight the British at the same time, something that for a while seriously divided the Americans’ fighting forces, although they were ultimately successful in this aim.
When independence was finally won from the British, the participation of the Amerinds in the anti-revolutionary campaign served to confirm the opinion of the new white nation that the Amerinds were irreparably hostile.
Thus it was that the American Constitution, accepted by the 13 former Colonies shortly after independence had been won, included the regulation of relations with the Amerinds under the clause of the Constitution which dealt with the regulation of relations with foreign states:
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution reads:
“The Congress shall have Power . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”
George Washington and the other original Founding Fathers of the United States therefore had not the slightest intention of ever including the Amerinds into their republic, classing them as outside aliens along with other “foreign nations.”
After the end of the American Revolution, white numbers in America continued to grow. Soon the desire for new farming land saw white settlers start to fan out westward, moving into the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
In all of these regions lived large numbers of Amerind tribes, many of whom had been there before the whites had first started settling in North America. Once again the scenario which had played itself out along the East coast occurred: small white settlements were attacked by the Amerinds; as the number of whites increased, successfully warding off and then beating the Amerinds became possible.
This time, however—and this would set the pattern right up until the last great Amerind-white race war in the late 19th century—the Amerinds had absorbed some of the white innovations, in particular the gun and the horse, both of which the Amerinds had obtained from traders or from raids on settlers. Armed and mobile, the Amerinds of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee proved harder to beat. A white army dispatched to deal with the situation was badly defeated by the Amerinds near what is now Fort Wayne in Indiana.
Finally, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 in northwestern Ohio, a white American punitive force, sent to avenge a particularly nasty series of Amerind attacks, decisively defeated the natives. A treaty between the races, the Treaty of Greenville, established a definite boundary between what was designated “Indian Territory” and the white settlement area.
THE TRADE AND INTERCOURSE ACTS
Despite the prevailing view among all white Americans of the Amerinds as being a particularly savage people, there was a desire to ensure that their lack of sophistication was not exploited by unscrupulous white traders or frontiersmen, of whom there were a small minority. So it was that the Trade and Intercourse Acts, a series of laws passed by the U.S. Congress at the end of the 18th century, attempted to regulate trading practices with the Amerinds. Among the measures were provisions allowing for the punishment of traders found to be defrauding the Amerinds.
The white frontiersmen in the Ohio River valley relived the terror and anxiety of the first white settlers on the Eastern Seaboard: subjected to intermittent and unexpected attacks, they were forced to be constantly on their guard and soon became used to the rugged demands of life spent part at war and part at creating, from scratch, entire towns and farms.
This state of affairs helped to create what later became known as the “manifest destiny” syndrome: the frontiersmen began to regard it as almost their sacred duty to wrest land away from the Amerinds and open it to white settlement. They saw the Amerinds as a savage race under whom the rich continent had lain idle for thousands of years. It was up to the frontiersmen to settle it and to break the sod.
This belief in an ordained destiny to bring civilization to the interior of the continent was fed by the cruelty of the ongoing conflicts with the Amerinds. Daily the frontiersmen had to deal with unspeakable Indian brutalities which reinforced their belief in their own cultural superiority.
This attitude was, however, opposed by a small but growing group of whites on the now established and relatively easy living eastern seaboard who were not exposed to the dangers, violence and rigors of life at the frontier: this was the start of a split in the White population in America that would ultimately become associated with the issue of slavery and racial conflict, leading up to the American Civil War of 1861-1865.
During the American-British War of 1812, the Shawnee Amerinds sided with Britain, partly as a result of having suffered a defeat at the hands of an American force at the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana. The Shawnee had long been receiving aid from British North America, or Canada, and this alliance was one of the causes of the outbreak of the war between America and Britain. The great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, a man opposed to unnecessary acts of cruelty, was, however, killed when the American revolutionaries defeated a combined British and Shawnee force at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813.
WHITES EATEN BY AMERINDS AT FORT MIMS
In Alabama, the Creek Amerinds seized Fort Mims in 1812, cruelly massacring all the white inhabitants—men, women and children—and then engaging in a cannibalistic orgy on the remains of all the whites they could find in the settlement.
Shocked, an avenging white army under Andrew Jackson was sent south. After two years of conflict the Creek were finally, decisively defeated at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814. Andrew Jackson then went on to be elected president of the United States in 1828. His first hand experiences with the Amerinds made him turn a deaf ear to the liberals of the East and it was largely as a result of his maneuverings that the next great event in white-Amerind history was to take place in 1830.
INDIANS MOVED WEST OF MISSISSIPPI
By 1830, the numbers of whites in the region between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains—essentially the present day Midwestern states of America—had reached the point where it was no longer possible to efficiently regulate the very often violent interaction between the whites and the Amerinds. In May of that year, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which empowered the president of the United States to move Amerinds west of the Mississippi, to the officially declared “Indian Territory”—and in particular the state now known as Oklahoma.
To the white liberals on the eastern seaboard, the Removal Act was an outrage perpetrated by the same sort of people who owned black slaves, and they opposed it. The Removal Act would become another factor in the political divide among the whites in America.
The original intention as stated in the Removal Act was that the removals were to be voluntary. While the vast majority were indeed peaceful (the Amerinds were as keen to get away from the whites as the whites were to get rid of the Amerinds), a small number were not. These forced removals later became an icon of oppression for the Amerinds.
The Sauk and Fox tribes rebelled in 1832, sparking off the Black Hawk War in Illinois and Wisconsin. This conflict ended in August of that year when the last major group of Sauk warriors was killed by white troopers while they were trying to cross the Mississippi River into Iowa. The circumstances of this battle—in which the Amerinds were caught halfway through the river—resulted in so many fatalities on the Amerind side that it became known as the Bad Axe Massacre.
The Seminole tribe in Florida also resisted violently. The Seminole War followed from 1835 to 1842 which eventually saw this native tribe defeated and rounded up into a reservation against their will. By the mid-1850s, virtually all of the eastern half of America had been cleared of Amerinds, either through voluntary departure or forced removal.
By the middle of the 19th century, the rate of white expansion and settlement into the Midwest and even beyond to the Pacific coast had made the concept of “Indian territory” unsustainable. In an effort to reach a compromise between the demands of the white settlers and the objections of the Amerinds, the concept of “Indian territories” was then changed into “Indian reservations.”
These reservations were smaller in territorial size than the “Indian territories” but as an exchange for accepting the smaller lands, the American government gave the ironclad guarantee that the reservations were exactly that: no whites would ever be able to settle or own land in them and they would be the inalienable property of the various tribes, whose numbers by this stage had dropped from an estimated 850,000 in 1550, to just under 400,000 by the mid-19th century.
As there were only 400,000 Amerinds in the entire North American continent around 1850, the belief that reservations would protect the Amerinds was not far fetched at all, and in real terms the land so set aside for the Amerinds was significant, given the numbers that were under consideration.
The discovery of gold in the western territories in 1849, created a wave of new white settlers in that region. This in turn sparked off attacks by the Amerind tribes who had by now seen what had happened in the east. In Idaho and Oregon, conflicts between white settlers and the Bannock and Shoshone tribes broke out. The same happened in Nevada and Utah, where the Ute fought the settlers. In the southwest, the Apache and Navajo put up the most organized resistance.
In northern California, the settlers were set upon by a vicious Amerind tribe, the Modocs. After a series of attacks, the Modocs finally crossed the line with a particularly bad massacre of whites in 1872. Enraged, the settlers formed a militia, and the Modoc Wars of 1872-1873 followed, which saw the Amerinds in California utterly defeated.
PLAINS WARS
The creation of reservations was part accepted and part rejected by the Amerind tribes. Some immediately accepted the offer of guaranteed protection against further white incursions and either settled in the reservations, or found their already existing lands included into the reservations. However, some of the larger tribes objected and the white-Amerind race war, which had continued in fits and starts ever since the first whites arrived in North America—then entered its conclusive phase in a series of conflicts known as the Plains Wars.
The Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux all fought the settlers as hard as they could. There were countless small localized engagements which saw hundreds, if not eventually thousands, of Amerinds killed, with ferocious fighting taking place over a massive area right through the 1860s and 1870s. The most famous of these engagements, and also the penultimate clash, was the Battle of Little Bighorn.
The Battle of Little Bighorn was fought between a regiment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and a force of Sioux and Cheyenne Amerinds on June 25, 1876, in what is now the state of Montana. Gold had been discovered in the nearby Black Hills in 1874. This had led to the inevitable massive and overnight influx of prospectors into Amerind lands. Immediately the Sioux and Cheyenne chiefs Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Gall organized raiding parties on the white intruders.
By 1876, the 7th Cavalry had been posted to protect the white prospectors. In June of that year, a single regiment—655 men—of the 7th Cavalry advanced on a party in excess of 4,000 Sioux at the junction of the Bighorn and the Little Bighorn rivers.
The soldiers were, it transpired later, unaware of the actual size of the heavily armed Amerind force. Custer realized his error too late. In a desperate attempt to break the Sioux force, he personally led a frontal charge of 260 of his men into the waiting Amerinds. The charge failed and Custer and his tiny force were surrounded. Fighting standing literally back to back with each other, Custer and his soldiers were slowly cut down one by one, and all were killed.
Although this battle was a white defeat, it would be the last. Within a year, follow-up operations by the white armies had crushed the last of the Sioux and Cheyenne resistance; most of the Amerind survivors were then moved to a reservation in Oklahoma.
Isolated clashes then took place in the late 1870s, but by 1880 the conflict had petered out, only flaring up again briefly in 1890.
The Plains Wars came to a final bloody end at the Battle (or massacre) of Wounded Knee in December 1890. Situated inside the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the area was populated by the Sioux Amerinds. In 1889, a Paiute medicine man, Wovoka (“Wood Cutter,” also known as Jack Wilson), began prophesying amongst various tribesmen that if they performed a special dance—the Ghost Dance—long enough, this would result in the return of all of their former lands, the resurrection from the dead of all their ancestors and the death of all the whites. [Wovoka preached non-violence, but two of the Miniconjou, Kicking Bear and Short Bull, differed. They argued for the elimination of whites by violence.–Ed.]
The prophesies spread like wildfire amongst the Sioux, who then not only started performing the ritual dance in large numbers, but also began stockpiling guns and ammunition ready for a rebellion when called upon to rise up by the dead ancestors.
The white government soon became aware of the goings on, and in December 1890, a detachment of the 7th Cavalry arrived in the Pine Ridge Reservation and arrested the Sioux chief, Sitting Bull (the same one who had been instrumental in the clashes which led to the Battle of Little Bighorn), in a move designed to break the rebellion before it started. As he was being led away, a lone Amerind fired a shot at the troopers. A full-scale gunfight then erupted and 13 people were killed, including Sitting Bull. The Sioux then fled to the settlement of a neighboring chief, Big Foot of the Miniconjou band, who was camped near Wounded Knee Creek, with the 7th Cavalry in hot pursuit.
On Dec. 29, 1890, the federal troops entered the Sioux camp at Wounded Knee. A scuffle broke out and then a new gunfight erupted. It has never been established who fired the first shot, with both the Sioux and the whites claiming it was the other side.
The end result was that when the shooting stopped, around 200 Sioux and 31 whites had been killed. About half of the Sioux dead were women and children caught in the crossfire as the gunfight had taken place in the middle of a settlement. This engagement which was half a military operation and half a massacre, was the last of the major white-Amerind conflicts in North America, although Wounded Knee would feature once again in 1973 in another, smaller standoff between the American government and the Sioux.
RACIAL CONSEQUENCES
Apart from the seizure of their land, which was brought about not primarily through military defeat but the simple swamping of that territory by whites (another example of how a change in population causes a change in culture), the Amerind-white wars produced two significant results:
• Firstly, the Amerinds were virtually eliminated as a political, racial and socio-demographic factor; this situation allowed for the final flooding of North America by whites, with all its resultant consequences for world history with the creation of the United States of America;
• Secondly, the subjugation of the Amerinds by masses of whites led to a certain amount of racial mixing between the two groups taking place. But, it being America with its officially endorsed disapproval of racial mixing (which lasted in legal form right into the middle of the 20th century, with anti-miscegenation laws still being on the statute books as late as 1967 in many states) those mixed-race persons born of white-Amerind unions—or indeed of black-Amerind unions, were absorbed into the Amerind population. This is one reason why many Amerinds may look fairer or darker than Mongoloid peoples or may have markedly non-Mongoloid facial features: full-blooded Amerinds are fairly rare.
By the end of the 19th century, the successive wars, rampant alcoholism and natural shrinkage had seen the Amerind population of America drop to an all-time low of 237,000, virtually to the point of complete extinction. [This number was split up into some 2,000 tribes speaking about 296 languages of 29 different language families (and 27 languages that are isolates or unclassified)—Ed.]
The realization dawned that if something were not done, they would disappear completely. In 1871 then, the U.S. Congress decided to abandon the system of treaties with the Amerind tribes and start making laws directly for their preservation—the notion of the Amerinds as being foreign nations was substituted for a policy of wardship, although they were still not granted citizenship of the United States of America.
A new law, the General Allotment Act of 1887, saw a determined effort by the American government to bring the Amerinds into the mainstream of white society. The concept of communally owned tribal lands was abolished, being replaced with individual plots and individual land ownership as was the norm in the rest of the country.
This policy, well intentioned as it was—with the belief that private ownership of land would help lift the Amerinds’ standard of living as this process had with the whites—was a total failure.
Vast numbers of Amerinds simply sold their land as soon as they were given it: sometimes at pathetically low prices, often to unscrupulous land speculators. The result of the General Allotment Act was that the Amerinds succeeded only in losing much of their tribal land without showing any benefit in return.
CITIZENSHIP GRANTED TO AMERINDS
A series of chaotic and contradictory policies toward the Amerinds was then pursued by successive American governments, all of them ultimately failing in their aim of forcing the Amerinds into mainstream society. During the course of these policies, the Amerinds were finally granted American citizenship in 1924—some 145 years after the United States of America had been created.
Finally it was acknowledged that the Indian allotment policy was a disaster, and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 saw the policy abandoned, along with the forced-integration policy. Amerind tribal lands lost during the allotment era were repurchased by the American government and the tribes were encouraged to set up their own governments in the restored semi-independent regions. A credit program on very generous terms was set up, backed by the government, to lend money to Amerinds to re-establish their societies.
This policy continued until after the end of World War II, when another change in policy occurred: Arguments were raised against the preferential treatment in terms of jobs and federal government credit, saying that Amerinds should be treated like any other people in America. Thus by 1953, the federal government undertook to slowly dismantle its bodies and institutions devoted to dealing with the Amerinds as a separate racial group.
Despite this, the U.S. government has to the present day maintained an army of civil servants— in excess of 16,000—in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (mostly Amerinds who are still hired on a preferential treatment basis).
The Amerind population has, through a process of natural increase and absorption of a significant number of whites, gradually increased: by the end of the 20th century, it stood at over 2 million, the highest number ever in that group’s entire existence.1 In spite of the gradual increase in the standard of living and education amongst the Amerinds, they still remain at the very bottom of the social scale in modern America.
This causes isolated outbreaks of violence, including a famous 1973 incident at the site of the Wounded Knee incident. However (for the greatest part) the Amerinds, who once were the most significant threat to the settlement of North America by the whites, are destined never to be a major factor in American society again.
ENDNOTES:
1 Some authorities, however, dispute this and claim there may once have been, in pre-Columbian times, an estimated 12 million North American Indians.—Ed.
ARTHUR KEMP is the Rhodesian-born author of March of the Titans: A History of the White Race (available from TBR for $42).He worked at the South African Conservative Party’s head office on their weekly newspaper, and authored the main “Vote No” party literature used in the 1992 referendum, which made him the single largest distributed author in South African political history. He also worked as political secretary to the leader of the Conservative Party, Dr. Treurnicht, but was expelled from the party in 1993 for advocating the rejection of apartheid in favor of an Afrikaner homeland policy.
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