Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (14 page)

Today we think of Indians as tragic figures, woebegone on the reservation. But that’s not how Andrew Jackson—Indian fighter and later president—saw them. Jackson knew the Indians were canny, organized, and strong. In short order they had the same guns and equipment as the white man. The Indians knew the territory, they knew how to fight, and at first they resisted the settlers on even terms. We should not regard the Indians as passive weaklings. Many
of them had the spirit of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who famously cried, “Let the white race perish… . Back where they came, on a trail of blood, they must be driven! … Burn their dwellings—destroy their stock—slay their wives and children that their very breed may perish. War now! War for ever!”
¹³

This was not mere rhetoric—Indian massacres were a serious threat that settlers had to contend with. Some of this violence was unprovoked. Indians weren’t retaliating for injuries done them; they were engaging in simple banditry and theft. As late as the 1840s, a traveler heading north from Mexico commented on the regularity of Comanche raids over the previous months. “Upward of ten thousand heads of horses and mules have already been carried off, scarcely has a hacienda or rancho on the frontier been unvisited, and everywhere the people have been killed or captured.”
¹⁴
It was only over time, with the advance of Western technology, that the raiding threat subsided and the military advantage shifted decisively in favor of the settlers.

So the settlers fought the Indians, and made deals with them, and signed treaties with them, and sometimes broke those treaties, and eventually the settlers got the land they wanted. The Indians were forced to retreat and settle for reparations and reservations. For many decades now, the U.S. government has tried to make restitution to Indians for broken promises and repudiated agreements. Unfortunately, the result has been to make large numbers of Indians dependent on the federal government. Many Indians today live on reservations without working, subsisting off the federal dole. I drove across the Pine Ridge reservation with Charmaine White Face. We saw the dilapidated trailers the Indians lived in. In every village, there were stray dogs barking loudly. I saw in the Indians, especially the young men, the same look of hopelessness that I used to see among slum-dwellers in Mumbai. “This is a terrible place to live,”
White Face told me. I asked her if she trusted the federal government. She snorted. “Never! Look what they have done to our people. They promise to protect you, and then they destroy you.” I mentioned Obamacare. Her only response was, “Get ready.”

So when Indian leaders like White Face say that their people are being shafted, I know what she means. The Indians have gotten a bad deal. I’m not saying it is a good deal. At the same time, we should be clear about what the alternatives are. It makes no sense to say, “Give us back Manhattan.” We cannot give you back Manhattan because Manhattan was never yours. You sold a piece of land that was virtually worthless and on it others have built a great and glorious city. It is unjust to demand back what was never yours in the first place. Then you say, “Give us back the Black Hills.” You point out that there is uranium and other minerals in those hills, and now that land is worth a fortune. Once again, no Indian tribe knew how to mine uranium and no Indian tribe knew what to do with uranium if they had it. Other Americans have added value to the Black Hills by figuring out how to tap its resources, and now the Indians want the land back so they can take advantage of what others have figured out how to do. The Indians were cheated when the treaty was broken and they deserve a fair restitution. If the courts simply return the Black Hills, however, they will be giving back far more than was ever taken. The same is true of the rest of America. The land now is not the same as the land then, and demanding a return of land which others have developed and whose value others have increased is not justice; it is stealing.

The best option available to the Indians, it seems, is to assimilate to the new civilization that the Europeans brought to America, and to take advantage of the wealth-creation opportunities that have so enriched the lives of wave upon wave of immigrants. This assimilation option has been available to the native Indians in a way that,
for nearly two centuries, it was not available to blacks. Yet this is precisely the option that the native Indians rejected from the outset. Today, many Indians have assimilated, and some tribes have taken advantage of gaming rights and made huge fortunes through operating casinos. Still others live forlorn on the reservation, psychologically removed from the America that is around them. These are people who seem to prefer the joy of victimhood—and the exertions of claiming reparations of one sort or another—to the joy of entrepreneurial striving. They are doing this in the name of their ancestors, who were brave and resourceful people, and yet I sometimes wonder what their brave and resourceful ancestors would think if they could see the current state of the native Americans.

It seems easy for an armchair progressive activist to deplore Columbus’s legacy. I see the sadness in the eyes of a Charmaine White Face, and I am tempted to agree. Then I ask myself: What would have happened if Europeans never came to America? Would the Indians have developed their own modern civilization? Would they have adopted Western ways? Or would they have continued living as before, and what would that look like? I suppose it would look like the lifestyle of aboriginal tribes that we see today in Australia or Papua, New Guinea. Essentially they would be living characters out of
National Geographic
. No Western clothes, no Western medicine, no Western technology. If I wanted to be blunt about it, I’d throw in rotting teeth, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy. Imagine people still living in tepees and chasing animals for their meals.

I know, it sounds wonderful as an idea—perhaps even as a short vacation. But try living like that; it would be almost as strange as trying to jump around all day like a frog. The native Indians know that, which is why none of them live like that. They could—the reservations are huge, and the Indians could create a simulacrum of
their original lifestyle if they wanted to. But they don’t. In refusing to do so, they are voting for their current life over their ancestral life. The choice is not without its regrets. They have endured great hardships over the years, and they will never stop mourning the legacy of Columbus. Even so, they have no interest in going back to the
National Geographic
life. They would rather live in modern America and enjoy the fruits of the civilization that Columbus and his successors brought to the continent.

CHAPTER 7

THE MYTH OF AZTLAN

I’d like to see the United States disappear. I’d like to see it become part of Mexico, part of a huge new nation dominated by a Chicano majority.

C
HICANO SCHOLAR AND ACTIVIST
C
HARLES
T
RUXILLO

S
ome years ago, I witnessed a demonstration in southern California by a group of American Latinos waving Mexican flags. Clearly these Americans identified more with Mexico than with the United States. I was initially puzzled about why Americans felt this way. If they wanted to move to Mexico, they certainly could. I was not aware of any border restrictions preventing Americans from getting into Mexico. Then I realized why these Latinos don’t make the move. They think they
are
living in Mexico—the part of Mexico that was illegally seized and occupied by the United States. For many Americans, the Mexican War in the mid-nineteenth century may seem like ancient history. But just as some Southerners haven’t gotten over the Civil War, these Hispanics haven’t gotten over the Mexican War. Unlike the Southerners, who seem reconciled to having lost their war, the Hispanics want to undo the effects of the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the treaty that ceded half of Mexico to the United States. Even so, they don’t want to become Mexicans again. Rather, these American Latinos seek to create a new country, encompassing northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, a place they call Aztlan. “Aztlan” is derived from Aztec, and is supposed to recall the land where the great Aztec empire once thrived.

During that demonstration, I engaged in conversation an illegal immigrant from Mexico, and he made a passionate plea that has stayed with me since. He said, “The United States grabbed half of Mexico out of a pure lust for land. Most of what we call the Southwest—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and parts of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado—was part of Mexico. We are Mexican people and this used to be our land, before the United States invaded our country and took it. We still consider the land to be ours by right. Yet the Americans won’t let us return and do agricultural labor on land that once belonged to us. How wicked can people be that they take something that is yours and then they won’t even let you work and support your family on the land of your fathers?”

I still recall the wistful face of the man who said that. The issue he raised wasn’t one I’d considered before, nor has it gone away since. Today leading Hispanic intellectuals and activists form part of a progressive coalition that presses the same argument. These Hispanics, however, are not wistful; they are angry. And they are here not to beg but to insist. Contemporary activists like Angel Gutierrez, Rodolfo Acuna, and Armando Navarro attribute America’s size and wealth to its lust for conquest. Acuna’s standard textbook, assigned in numerous American schools and colleges, is titled
Occupied America
. The title refers to America’s acquisition of half of Mexico, and also to Hispanic reoccupation of America. What these activists want is a restoration of land that was taken, not necessarily to Mexico but to American Hispanics. And if the whites don’t give it, these
activists believe that the Hispanic population will soon become the majority group in the Southwest. Then it will be in a position to take it. Immigration—legal and illegal—is the mechanism that today’s progressive organizers are counting on to undo the consequences of the Mexican War, and make the dream of Aztlan a reality.

Hispanic activists offer different versions of the Aztlan solution. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, I met Charles Truxillo, a former professor at the University of New Mexico, to interview him for the
America
film. Truxillo conceded that, strictly speaking, the Aztlan idea is a myth. The Chicanos of the 1960s, he says, talked about how they were originally Aztecs and how they wanted to recover the territory of the Aztec empire. Even today, he says, many Hispanics get together to do Aztec dances and re-live the Aztec fantasy. But the Aztecs, Truxillo points out, did not inhabit what is now the southwestern United States. They were farther south, in present-day Mexico. Yet Truxillo says Aztlan represents a “metaphorical” truth. The Southwest—what Americans call the Southwest—is actually El Norte, the northern part of Mexico that America stole by force.

This theft, Truxillo says, has to be rectified. For many years he flirted with a land grant solution. This would require the United States to restore to Mexicans the lands originally granted by the Spanish government when Spain ruled Mexico. Essentially Hispanics would be given large tracts of land in the United States, similar to Indian reservations. Hispanics, like native Indians, would become an autonomous “nation within a nation.” Today, however, Truxillo has a new solution. His new solution is for the United States and Mexico to combine into a single great nation. Over time, he excitedly says, this would become a Hispanic nation, not an Anglo or white nation. Moreover, this solution doesn’t require a war; it is, in a sense, happening naturally, through immigration and higher Hispanic birth rates. Truxillo assures me that eventually the border between
the United States and Mexico will simply disappear. History, he concludes, has a way of settling old scores.

Armando Navarro is chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California at Riverside. He sports a drawing of Che Guevara in his office, and also a photo of him posing with Fidel Castro. In 2001 Navarro led a group of Chicanos and Mexicans at the Zapatista March into Mexico City. He said he wanted to “demonstrate our solidarity with the indigenous people of Mexico.” Navarro argues that Mexicans “were victims of an imperialism by which Mexico lost half its territory.” Today, he says, the Latino vote is powerful enough to be the swing vote in elections; tomorrow, it will be in a position to realize Aztlan. After all, the end of the Soviet empire created new possibilities, from the breakup of Yugoslavia to reassertions of Chechen independence. The same could happen here. “Imagine the possibility that Mexico recovers the lost territories, or that a new Republic of Aztlan is established.”

Navarro calls for Hispanics to do to the Americans what the Americans did to their Mexican ancestors. The Americans took the land by force, and now the Hispanics can take it back. Navarro does not consider himself a secessionist. His point is that the Mexicans, unlike the Southerners, never agreed to join the American union. Since the original conquest was illegitimate, the establishment of Aztlan is justified, however it is obtained. Hispanics are not seceding from America; they are simply getting back what originally belonged to them. America is the usurper that is being compelled to return its stolen territory.

There is, however, an irony to these calls for land repatriation. I alluded to it in my chapter on native Indians, but it re-emerges here even more strongly. America, in a sense, is being accused of a double theft. Allegedly we stole the country from the Indians, and then we stole a large part of Mexico from the Hispanics. Yet if the
two continents of North and South America once belonged to the native Indians, then how did the Hispanics become owners of that land? There is a simple answer: they conquered it. Historian Patricia Limerick points out in
The Legacy of Conquest
that “the Hispanic presence in the Southwest was itself a product of conquest. The Pueblo Indians found themselves living in Occupied America long before the Hispanics did.”
¹
The term “Hispanic” refers to Spain, and “Latino” derives from the term Latin. So these terms refer to Spanish people from Europe who see themselves as descended from the Latin-speaking Romans. These Spanish then interbred with the locals, producing a mestizo or mixed-race Latino group. Hispanics, or Latinos, are a mixed-race people who trace their ancestry to the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Yet if the Spanish illicitly seized the land from the Indians, then the land doesn’t actually belong to them. If America cannot claim title to land by conquest, then neither can the people from whom it was taken, who themselves took it from someone else.