An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Author:Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780807000410
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2014-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

ANNIHILATION UNTO TOTAL SURRENDER

The US Army’s search-and-destroy missions and forced relocations (ethnic cleansing) in the West are well documented but perhaps not normally considered in the light of counterinsurgency.

Mari Sandoz recorded one such story in her 1953 best-selling work of nonfiction Cheyenne Autumn, on which John Ford based a 1964 film.33 In 1878, the great Cheyenne resistance leaders Little Wolf and Dull Knife led more than three hundred Cheyenne civilians from a military reservation in Indian Territory, where they had been forcibly confined, to their original homeland in what is today Wyoming and Montana. They were eventually intercepted by the military, but only following a dramatic chase covered by newspaper reporters. So much sympathy was aroused in eastern cities that the Cheyennes were provided a reservation in a part of their original homeland. A similar feat was that of the Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) under Chief Joseph, who tried to lead his people out of military incarceration in Idaho to exile in Canada. In 1877, pursued by two thousand soldiers of the US cavalry led by Nelson Miles, Nimi’ipuu led eight hundred civilians toward the Canadian border. They held out for nearly four months, evading the soldiers as well as fighting hit-and-run battles, while covering seventeen hundred miles. Some were rounded up and placed in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, but they soon left on their own and returned to their Idaho homeland, eventually securing a small reservation there.

The longest military counterinsurgency in US history was the war on the Apache Nation, 1850–86. Goyathlay, known as Geronimo, famously led the final decade of Apache resistance. The Apaches and their Diné relatives, the Navajos, did not miss a beat in continuing resistance to colonial domination when the United States annexed their territory as a part of the half of Mexico taken in 1848. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico, which sealed the transfer of territory, even stipulated that both parties were required to fight the “savage” Apaches. By 1877 the army had forced most Apaches into inhospitable desert reservations. Led by Geronimo, Chiricahua Apaches resisted incarceration in the San Carlos reservation designated for them in Arizona. When Geronimo finally surrendered—he was never captured—the group numbered only thirty-eight, most of those women and children, with five thousand soldiers in pursuit, which meant that the insurgents had wide support both north and south of the recently drawn US-Mexico border. Guerrilla warfare persists only if it has deep roots in the people being represented, the reason it is sometimes called “people’s war.” Obviously, the Apache resistance was not a military threat to the United States but rather a symbol of resistance and freedom. Herein lies the essence of counterinsurgent colonialist warfare: no resistance can be tolerated. Historian William Appleman Williams aptly described the US imperative as “annihilation unto total surrender.”34

Geronimo and three hundred other Chiricahuas who were not even part of the fighting force were rounded up and transported by train under military guard to Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida, to join hundreds of other Plains Indian fighters already incarcerated there.

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