Global Racial Violence

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century history of American settler colonialism, what it reveals about the transformation of global politics in terms of racial violence, and, as a consequence, how it comes to structure ideas about global peace and order. It examines more specifically the case of American settler colonialism in the nineteenth century and the very ideas of the vanishing Indian. The nineteenth-century American Indian Wars were a critical dimension of the relationship between savage or racial warfare and global order. The discussion turns to Theodore Roosevelt’s idea that global politics is not (or not primarily) the realm of power politics; rather, the cleavages remain those of civilized races perpetually dominating or fearing racial violence from uncivilized barbarians. As a consequence, savage wars or racial wars become part and parcel of American imperial expansion, and their legacy is derived from the history of American settler colonialism.

Within Indian wars and the Wounded Knee massacre

Besides recorded in textbooks, historical events sometimes are adopted into literary works. Rebecca Wiles’ Bury Me at Wounded Knee is one of which since it portrays the Indian Wars and the Wounded Knee Massacre on 29 December 1890. The clause Bury Me at Wounded Knee in the poem is a form of self-determination of Native Americans. This paper aims at mapping the causal relation of historical events found in the poem to examine the Native Americans’’ self-determination inside it. As the basis, the paper employs the Historicism theory and Self-Determination theory (SDT) about autonomous and controlled motivations. The results found that the Native Americans’ self-determination in the poem is an undermined one. It is built by their internal autonomous motivation of deeply rooted culture and beliefs. However, the encroachments of the U.S. government who seized their rights, acted as controlled extrinsic motivations, internalized and thwarted the intrinsic motivation so that the self-determination is undermined. It decreases in the degree from an eagerness to act and resist to merely a wish of being buried in the location where they die and think of extinction.

The Global Land Grab

This chapter evaluates why the amount of landlessness in the world is going up dramatically. The primary cause for this is a wave of land acquisition in the Global South. China has obtained vast tracts of land in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. American, European, and Indian investors are also in the mix. Local elites are in the game as well; they are at least as active as the foreigners in land acquisitions. Whether for good reasons or bad reasons, lots of land is being sold in the Global South and cultivators are losing their homes and their livelihoods. The fact that land transfers do not involve what is officially designated as “arable” land does not mean that dispossession is not occurring. When the United States occupied Native American lands, none of that territory officially counted in the census as “arable” land, since the frontier was not cultivated by white people. Those land seizures led to three hundred years of Indian wars.

Between Civilization and Savagery: How Reconstruction Era Federal Indian Policy Led to the Indian Wars

This article considers the event of a single year, 1873, to explain how President Ulysses S. Grant’s federal Indian policy led to the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century. Some historians have argued that Grant’s so-called Peace Policy failed due to systemic mismanagement and corruption; others have suggested it was due to administrative incompetence or ambivalence, while still others have accused the administration of cynicism in its approach to Indigenous affairs. This article argues that the Peace Policy reflected the unresolved tensions inherent in the era’s zeitgeist and that it failed to usher in a lasting peace because it did not account for the enmeshed reality of life in the American West where the boundaries and borders between Indian reservations and settler communities were entangled to say the least. The article begins with a detailed consideration of the Grant administration’s Indian policy as articulated by Francis Amasa Walker in the winter of 1872–73. Largely overlooked by historians of post–Civil War Indian policy, Walker was an influential thinker in his day whose policy recommendations emphasized the moral necessity of proprietary individualism and racial segregation on isolated reservations. The article then turns to the unfolding drama of the Modoc War (1872–73) to explore why the federal government abandoned the project of peacefully incorporating Indigenous people into the body politic, leading to a harsher and more militant approach to Indian affairs. By focusing on the nexus of ideas and events as they played out at this critical historical juncture, this article argues that the Modoc War was the precipitating event that marked the end of Grant’s so-called Peace Policy and the resumption of the Indian wars in the decades following the Civil War.

Caballeros and Indians

Chapter 1 examines Latina/o encounters with and reclamations of indigeneity from the eighteenth century to the present. Deploying violentologies as a heuristic device and hermeneutic prism, it focuses on established and emergent Latina/o autobiographical literary genres, cinematic texts, performative popular culture spectacles, and recently recovered archival materials and unique oral histories. These texts cumulatively reveal the wide spectrum of Latina/o antipathies toward, and affiliations with, Native nations and indigenous peoples in the United States and abroad. This chapter thus foregrounds the ideological diversity of supra-Latina/o violentologies by examining the myriad Latina/o involvements in the US Indian Wars vis-à-vis ambidextrous, albeit ambivalent, Latina/o neoindigenous, as well as problematic indigenist, performances of XicanIndia/o and LatIndia/o modalities, in addition to mixed-heritage, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and nonbinary (LGBTQI+), as well as Two-Spirit warrior paradigms in Indian Country and elsewhere.

Indian Fighters in the Philippines

This article explores the connections between the violence that accompanied U.S. continental expansion in the nineteenth century and the Philippine-American War, which began in 1899 after Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States following the Spanish-American War. Perhaps geographic distance has served to mask the temporal proximity of these linked periods of U.S. expansion, because this is a connection that has remained largely unexplored in the historiography. Rather than viewing 1898 as a caesura marking the separation between the continental and global phases of American empire, this article explores continuities through an examination of the interaction between imperial culture and military violence. Some U.S. soldiers in the Philippines drew directly on their experiences in wars with Native people, while others narrated their time in the Philippines as an “Indian war” and validated their actions by discursively positioning themselves and their troops as “Indian fighters.” The Indian Wars were translated, through the actions, imaginations, and writing of U.S. soldiers, politicians, and journalists, into a flexible discourse able to travel across space and time. These frontier resonances became one of several structuring narratives that sought to racialize Filipinos in order to justify the war and occupation.