Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas by Jeffrey Ostler (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas by Jeffrey Ostler William J. Bauer Jr. Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas By Jeffrey Ostler (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. ix, 533. Notes, bibliography, index. Paperbound, $25.00.) In 1778, Lenape (Delaware) leaders informed U.S. congressional commissioners that "it is the design of the [United] States … to extirpate the Indians and take possession of their country" (p. 61). According to historian Jeffrey Ostler, the Lenape leaders understood a foundational aspect of U.S. policy: the nation's westward expansion depended upon the taking of Indigenous people's lands through genocidal warfare. In the first of a proposed two volumes, Ostler argues that between 1776 and 1850, the United States pursued a policy of genocidal warfare against Indigenous people in what he calls the "zone of removal." The United States threatened Indigenous people east of the Mississippi River with legalized wars of extermination and acted on those laws. Deliberate acts of eliminatory warfare further endangered Indigenous people through rape, starvation, and disease. Yet Surviving Genocide is more than a one-sided, top-down approach to federal Indian policy and the nation's westward expansion. Ostler highlights Indigenous voices, perspectives, and criticisms of federal Indian policy. As the Lenape leaders demonstrated, Indigenous people knew that the United States wanted to eliminate them and take their land. Oster divides the book into three parts. In the first, he details how English settler colonialism set the stage for genocidal warfare in the early republic. English colonialism exposed Indigenous people to violence, disease, and slavery. During the Seven Years' War, English colonists offered scalp bounties, waged [End Page 187] biological warfare—Jeffrey Amherst's notorious act of issuing blankets from the smallpox hospital to Indigenous people—and massacred non-combatant Conestogas in Pennsylvania. The American Revolution accelerated the destructive nature of warfare. Colonists rebelled against England, in part, because the Crown prevented the colonists from expanding westward and incited, to quote the Declaration of Independence, "merciless Indian Savages." During the war, Ostler writes, "U.S. officials, including Thomas Jefferson, George Rogers Clark, George Clinton and George Washington, repeatedly declared an intention to extirpate, exterminate, or destroy Indians they defined as enemies" (pp. 78–79). Colonists massacred non-combatant Indigenous people at Gnadenhutten, a Moravian missionary colony in modern-day Ohio. Indigenous leaders, such as Cherokee Dragging Canoe and Haudenosaunee Joseph Brant, recognized the eliminatory bent of the colonists' war tactics. Dragging Canoe, for example, informed British officials that it was the "Intention [of the United States] … to destroy [the Cherokees] from being a people" (p. 55). After the American Revolution, the new federal government designed policies intended to take Indigenous lands, by genocidal force if necessary. The Northwest Ordinance established an either-or proposition for Indigenous people—either sell land or face extermination warfare—with a clause that authorized "just and lawful wars" (p. 93). Of course, the United States did not eliminate all Indigenous people: "U.S. incompetence and Native competence combined to camouflage the genocidal potential of U.S. military operations in the Ohio Valley during this period" (p. 121). Indigenous confederacies resisted U.S. expansion. Tecumseh traveled from Shawnees living on the Sandusky River in Ohio to the Osage Nation on the central Plains, and from Menominees near Green Bay to the Creeks on the Tallapoosa River. He informed the Osage, "they wish to kill our warriors; they would even kill our old men, women and little ones" (p. 159). In parts two and three, Ostler challenges the idea that genocide and ethnic cleansing were inseparable. He finds Indigenous populations were increasing east of the Mississippi rather than vanishing, as many Americans alleged. The federal government's policy of forcibly removing Indigenous people to lands west of the Mississippi River produced catastrophic population decline for removed people and imperiled Indigenous people living west of the Mississippi. As early as 1810, the process of removal began in the West. The United States negotiated treaties with the Osage, and with other nations, and pushed them west. Indigenous Lenapes, Shawnees, and others moved onto...