We erased the “Native Americans” in more ways than one: The United States of America, Canada, and Spanish perpetrated countless sins against the First Peoples of North America. Mass slaughter, reeducation camps and the purposeful destruction of their economies and technologies are all the ones that come to mind. Yet, both the Pro-First Peoples Whites and self-centered Expansionists erase them through diabolical compression.
There are two common cultural caricatures: the rough riding anti-cowboy who attacks the colonial village at night to scalp the innocent religious refugees. This caricature now mostly sits in the heads of the Silent Generation and Boomers. It is passing to a boring, undeveloped dispassion for the poverty of modern FPs. Its adversary is now racing through Twitter, tumblr, TikTok via easily consumed feel-bad memes: the innocent native who lived at absolute peace with the land and was aligned with feminist and trans rights- oh, and they were socialists, too.
This simplification of First Peoples is disgusting. Imagine if the Turkish _did_ admit to genocide, but instead of distinguishing between Armenians and Kurds they just said “East Anatolians”. We would roll our eyes. That’s what we do when we say “We committed genocide on the Native Americans.”
From a one time immigration event, the FPs spread across the entire Continent. Without even bringing the South American civilizations into the picture, they encompassed every conceivable niche available to humans without a readily domesticatable animal. Yet, this wide diversity of niches meant that they had a wide diversity of political, economic, and social dynamics.
We can list of counterexamples to the Expanionist Caricature easily. The vast majority of the time First Peoples were not “rough riders” because they had no horses at all. In fact, it’s likely that the original Clovis people contributed to the extinction of the original North American horses which were only reintroduced by the Spanish. The Tunic peoples of Quizquiz were peaceful and the Chumash of South California were considered peaceful.
Yet, the Pro-FP Whites Caricature collapses on examination of peoples as well. The vast majority of First Peoples engaged in war. The Russians saw the Tlingit go to war over songs. They went to war for slaves! The Cahokia had war in their art and sport. This violence ranged from conflicts between local family units to conflicts between nations- as you can see in the expansionist policies of the Iroquois Confederacy. They were not “peaceful”.
The civilizations the Pueblo peoples and the Missippians built are comparable to the centers of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, the Indus River Valley, China, or South America. They, like many iterations of the Old World’s civilizations, fought against the environment and drained it of its resources until they collapsed. Even before sedentary life, the Folsom people were killing huge amounts of wildlife in bison jumps.
The tendency for Pro-FP Whites to center themselves creates an infantilized story wrapped in mood affiliation. It says, “You baby; I protec baby.” It is bad allyship and commits a sort of ad hominem fallacy. It seeks to portray First People as morally good, as if an entire peoples could be good, or is required for justice to be enacted. Guess what? Even if the First Peoples were, collectively and uniformly, war fighting anti-environmentalists a thousand years ago (*cough* the Mayans *cough*) they would still deserve justice today.
You don’t need to caricaturize First Peoples or valorize them, but when you do want to bring up their best values and practice or stand by them, it’s important to Say Their Names: Omàmiwinini, Haudenosaunee, Puebloans, Navajo, Ute… The list is long.
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