“Wars continued for another century, unrelentingly and without pause, and the march across the continent used the same tactics of scorched earth and annihilation with increasingly deadly fire power. Somehow even Genocide seems an inadequate descriptor for what happened, and rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country’s Manifest Destiny with the consolidation of the new state, the United State of America by 1790. The opportunity for indigenous nations to negotiate alliances with competing European Empires against the despised settlers who intended to destroy them was greatly narrowed. Nevertheless indigenous nations had defied the founding of the independent United States in a manner that allowed for their survival and created a legacy, a culture of resistance that has persisted. By the time of the birth of the US Republic, indigenous peoples in what is now the continental United States had been resisting European colonization for two centuries. They had no choice given the aspirations of the colonizers. Total elimination of native nations or survival. Pre-colonial indigenous societies were dynamic social systems with adaptation built into them. Fighting for survival did not require cultural abandonment, on the contrary, the cultures used already existing strengths such as diplomacy and mobility to develop new mechanisms to live in nearly constant crisis. There was always a hard core of resistance in that process, but the culture of resistance also includes accommodations to the colonizing social order. Including absorbing Christianity into already existing religious practices, or using the colonizer’s language, intermarrying with settlers, and more importantly with other oppressed groups such as escaped African slaves. Without a culture of resistance Native peoples under US colonization would have been eliminated through individual assimilation.”
Scorched Earth, Manifest Destiny, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, Indian Country, 1818 indigenous tribunals used in Guantanamo, Unlawful Combatants.