Book Club

An Indigenous People's History of the United States

It's devastating. The horrific cruelty of this country against its indigenous population is something we have to recon with, because the legacy echos through political conflicts today. Joe Biden apologizing is nice and all, but it rings hollow.

I'm struck by how US settlers were almost exactly the same as Israeli settlers, both in behavior and rhetoric. Israel is the 51st State because it's built on the same European settlers colonial structures with the same Manifest Destiny ideology.

I'm also seeing how US policy has been to displace class conflict by subsidizing land grabs for settlers, and I think that this process has continued through to today in the various ways home ownership are subsidized for the people the government wants elevated in their class position like veterans. There's also still land grabs, they're still stealing indigenous land and there's parallels with the ways they're stealing the public housing projects for development projects.

The so-called middle class can be more accurately described as a settler class, even if today the process of settlement seems complete.

EDIT okay I finished, more thoughts below

The text connects USs rampant militarism with it's unresolved settler-colonial past by connecting new and old conflicts in an interesting way.

From Vietnam to Iraq, the military explicitly refers to areas with the presence of guerillas as "Indian Country" because the US military is direct outgrowth of irregular warfare against indigenous peoples. The 2003 torture memo explicitly makes this connection to the Seminole Wars, saying that indigenous guerillas are not prisoners of war but rather irregular combatants unprotected by international or US law.

The through line is actually very clear from settlers cutting off penises as trophies to Vietnam soldiers cutting off ears for the same purpose. It's all about extermination of the indigenous and the project of "civilizing" the rest of the world via the Doctrine of Discovery.

We spend money on the military instead of social services because this is still a settler-colony. Military keynesianism is all we get.