An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (20 page)

Exploration and intelligence gathered by Pike, followed by infiltration and settlement of northern Mexican provinces preceded by US entrepreneurs, finally culminated in military invasion and war. US forces fought their way from Mexico's main commercial port of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico to the capital, Mexico City, nearly three hundred miles away. The US Army occupied the capital until the Mexican government agreed to cede its northern territories, codified in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Texas had become a
US state at the end of 1845. California quickly acquired statehood in 1850, followed by Nevada in 1864, Colorado in 1876, Wyoming in 1890, Utah in 1896, but the more densely populated Arizona and New Mexico not until 1912.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 had established a national system for surveying and distributing land, and as one historian has noted, “Under the May 1785 ordinance, Indian land would be auctioned off to the highest bidder.”
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The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, albeit guaranteeing Indigenous occupancy and title, set forth an evolutionary colonization procedure for annexation via military occupation, territorial status, and finally statehood. Conditions for statehood would be achieved when the settlers outnumbered the Indigenous population, which in the cases of both the Mexican cession area and the Louisiana Purchase territory required decimation or forced removal of Indigenous populations. In this US system, unique among colonial powers, land became the most important exchange commodity for the accumulation of capital and building of the national treasury. To understand the genocidal policy of the US government, the centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the US wealth and power must be seen. Apologists for US expansionism see the 1787 ordinance not as a reflection of colonialism, but rather as a means of “reconciling the problem of liberty with the problem of empire,” in historian Howard Lamar's words.
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Following the Mexican War, the United States faced problems more pressing than that of reconciling conflicting ideologies. For one thing, the vast majority in the annexed territory were Indigenous peoples or Mexican farmers and ranchers, landed communities. As for the Navajos, Apaches, and Utes who had resisted for centuries all colonization efforts by the Spanish and then the Mexican authorities, they continued to resist the new colonial regime. To understand how the peoples of these regions responded to the US invasion and conquest, and to understand their particular relationship with the United States today, it is essential to understand their history under Spanish colonization.

Although the Spanish Crown had dispatched explorers such as Coronado, Cabeza de Baca, and others, and had established trading and military posts and towns along the North American Atlantic Coast and in Florida and along the Gulf Coast as far as the Mississippi, Spanish settler-colonialist rule did not begin north of the Rio Grande until 1598. The soldier-settler colonizing mission launched a brutal military assault on the Pueblo towns in New Mexico and imposed state and church institutions. The colonizers found a thriving irrigation-based agriculture supporting a population living in ninety-eight interrelated city-states (
pueblos
, the Spanish called them), and within two decades they reduced the towns to twenty-one.
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Perhaps most provocative, given the Pueblos' extensive rituals and numerous religious feast days, the Franciscan missionaries forbade Pueblo religious practices and forced Christianity upon them. As Spanish repression and labor exploitation intensified, the Pueblos organized a revolution that also was supported by the unconquered Navajos, Apaches, and Utes, and the Hopi towns to the west in what is now Arizona. They were joined by the servant and laboring class of captive Indigenous and Mestizos in the Spanish capital at Santa Fe. In 1680, they drove the Spanish out of New Mexico, leaving the Pueblos free for twelve years before a new and permanent colonizing mission arrived.
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During another 130 years of Spanish rule before Mexico's independence, the Pueblos were strictly controlled and forced to provide foot soldiers for Spanish forays against the Navajos, Apaches, and Utes who were never colonized by the Spanish. Mexico ousted the Franciscans and left the Pueblos to their own lives, although much of their territory had been lost to permanent settlers.

The two largest Mexican provinces annexed by the United States, Coahuila y Tejas (Texas) and California, were more sparsely populated and not as tightly centralized and organized as New Mexico. After 1692, as the Spanish Crown sent an army to invade and reoccupy the Rio Grande Pueblos, it also sought effective control and settlement of California and Texas, in part to create a large buffer with competing French, British, and Russian imperialism.
After two centuries of dominance in the Americas, the Spanish state was crumbling politically and economically. Having experienced a depression in silver production in their American colonies and growing competition from other European powers, the Spanish settled on maintaining and expanding its northern holdings to hold back French and British encroachment into the mining areas of the interior of New Spain (Mexico).

In what is now the state of Texas, Spain built forts and expropriated land from the local Indigenous people, granting it to Spanish settlers to farm and ranch. The first Spanish town in Texas, San Antonio, was established in 1718, and Franciscan missionaries founded the Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo). Spanish forts, missions, and settlements dotted the territory, especially along the Rio Grande from Matamoras to Laredo. The Indigenous peoples of Texas included the Lupin Apaches, Jumanos, Coahuiltecans, Tonkawas, Karankawas, and Caddos, all of whom were more vulnerable to colonization than the more mobile Comanches and Wichitas in West Texas. By the time of Mexican independence, the Indigenous population of the province was around fifty thousand, while Spanish settlers numbered around thirty thousand.

During the first decade of Mexican independence, some ten thousand Cherokees, Seminoles, Shawnees, and many other Indigenous communities east of the Mississippi avoided forced removal to Indian Territory and escaped the iron heel of the United States, taking refuge in Mexico. One such community was the people of the Coahuila Kikapú (Kickapoo) Nation, forced out of its homeland when Wisconsin was opened for settlement. The Tohono O'odam Nation did not move anywhere, but the redrawn 1848 border split their homeland. The independent Republic of Mexico provided land grants for their various communities. With Texas's independence from Mexico, then US annexation, many moved south of the imposed new border.
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The Republic of Mexico opened a door to US domination by granting land to Anglo immigrants. During the first decade of Mexican independence, some thirty thousand Anglo-American farmers and plantation owners, along with their slaves, poured into Texas, receiving development land grants. By the time Texas became a US
state in 1845, Anglo settlers numbered 160,000.
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Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, which affected the Anglo-American settlers' quest for wealth in building plantations worked by enslaved Africans. They lobbied the Mexican government for a reversal of the ban and gained only a one-year extension to settle their affairs and free their bonded workers—the government refused to legalize slavery. The settlers decided to secede from Mexico, initiating the famous and mythologized 1836 Battle of the Alamo, where the mercenaries James Bowie and Davy Crockett and slave owner William Travis were killed. Although technically an Anglo-American loss, the siege of the Alamo served to stir Anglo patriotic passions, and within a month at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, Mexico handed over the province. This was a great victory for the Andrew Jackson administration, for Jackson's brother, Mason, who was one of the Texas planters, and especially for the alcoholic settler-warrior hero Sam Houston. The former governor of Tennessee, Houston was made commander in chief of the Texas army and president of the new “Texas republic,” which he helped guide to US statehood in 1845. One of the first acts of the pro-slavery independent government was to establish a counterinsurgency force that—as its name, the Texas Rangers, suggests—followed the “American way of war” in destroying Indigenous towns, eliminating Native nations in Texas, pursuing ethnic cleansing, and suppressing protest from Tejanos, former Mexican citizens.
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Mission San Francisco de Asis, also called Mission Dolores, was a Spanish Franciscan mission established on the Pacific Coast at the same time as the Presidio (military base) at San Francisco—1776, the year that Anglo-Americans declared independence from Britain. The purpose of the garrison was twofold: to protect the mission from Indigenous inhabitants whose territory the Spanish were usurping and to round up those same people and force them to live and work for the Franciscan friars at the mission. Mission Dolores was the sixth of the twenty-one Franciscan missions established between 1769 and 1823, when Mexico disbanded the missions. The establishment of the missions and presidios from San Diego and Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to Carmel, San Francisco, and Sonoma, traces the colonization of California's Indigenous nations.
The five-hundred-mile road that connected the missions was called El Camino Real, the Royal Highway.

The Spanish military in California was divided into four districts, each with Franciscan missions and strategically located presidios. The 1769 establishment of the first presidio in San Diego coincided with establishment of the first Franciscan mission in California. The second presidio was based in Monterey in 1770, to defend the six missions in the area as well as the mercury mines in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Monterey became the capital and the only port of entry for shipments to and from Spanish California, and it remained so until 1846, when the United States seized California.

These California Franciscan missions and their founder, Junípero Serra, are extravagantly romanticized by modern California residents and remain popular tourist sites. Very few visitors notice, however, that in the middle of the plaza of each mission is a whipping post. The history symbolized by that artifact is not dead and buried with the generations of Indigenous bodies buried under the California crust. The scars and trauma have been passed on from generation to generation. Putting salt in the wound, as it were, Pope John Paul II in 1988 beatified Junípero Serra, the first step toward sainthood. California Indigenous peoples were insulted by this act and organized to prevent the sanctification of a person they consider to have been an exponent of rape, torture, death, starvation, and humiliation of their ancestors and the attempted destruction of their cultures. Serra would take soldiers with him, randomly kidnapping Indigenous individuals and families, recording these captures in his diaries, as in this instance: “[When] one fled from between their [the soldiers'] hands, they caught the other. They tied him, and it was all necessary, for, even bound, he defended himself that they should not bring him, and flung himself on the ground with such violence that he scraped and bruised his thighs and knees. But at last they brought him.… He was most frightened and very disturbed.”
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In 1878, a old Kamia man named Janitin told an interviewer of his experience as a child: “When we arrived at the mission, they locked me in a room for a week.… Every day they lashed me unjustly because I did not finish what I did not know how to do, and thus I existed for many days until I found a way to escape; but I was tracked and they
caught me like a fox.” He was fastened to the stage and beaten to unconsciousness.

California Indigenous peoples resisted this totalitarian order. These insurgent actions are also recorded in official records and diaries, but they seem to have interested few historians until the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, when California Indigenous peoples began to do their own research. They found that no mission escaped uprising from within or attacks from outside by communities of the imprisoned along with escapees. Guerrilla forces of up to two thousand formed. Without this resistance, there would be no descendants of the California Native peoples of the area colonized by the Spanish.
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Under the protection of the US Army, beginning in 1848, gold seekers from all over the world brought death, torture, rape, starvation, and disease to the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral territories included the sought-after goldfields north and east of San Francisco. As Alejandro Murguía describes it, unlike the Native peoples for whom gold was irrelevant, the forty-niners “hungered for gold with a sickness”:

They would do anything for it. They left families, homes, everything behind; they sailed for eight months aboard leaky, smelly ships to reach California; others, captains and sailors, jumped ship at San Francisco, leaving a fleet of abandoned brigs, barks, and schooners to rot by the piers. They slaughtered all the game they could find and so muddied the rivers and creeks with silt that the once plentiful salmon couldn't survive. The herds of elk and deer, the food source for Native Americans, were practically wiped out in one summer. The miners cheated and killed each other in the goldfields.
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In a true reign of terror, US occupation and settlement exterminated more than one hundred thousand California Native people in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by 1870—quite possibly the most extreme demographic disaster of all time.
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Here too, against impossible odds, the Indigenous resisted and survived to tell the story. Had they not done so, there would be
no Indigenous peoples remaining in Northern California, because the objective was to eradicate them. From the onset of the California gold rush, crazed “gold bugs” invaded Indigenous territories, terrorizing and brutally killing those who were in their path. These settlers seemed to require no military assistance in running roughshod over unarmed Indigenous residents of fishing communities in a bountiful paradise of woods, rivers, and mountains. The role left for the US Army was to round up the starving Indigenous refugees to transport them to established reservations in Oregon and Oklahoma.