Asa Kowals-Rose | Blog for RFILP

These chapters discussed centuries of attacks on Indians’ religious artifacts and practices. While some of these were—to put it lightly—inconsiderate consequences of unrelated pursuits, many more were cruel and deliberate efforts to eliminate native religion. Almost all of these were either done with complete governmental complicity, or were perpetrated directly by soldiers and BIA agents.

Reading this history, I found myself questioning the government’s supposed purpose for aggressive cultural destruction. While most of the rhetoric surrounding this saga is in line with the “white man’s burden” beliefs expressed for centuries, this would imply a genuine concern for the lives of American Indians, albeit borne out of an extremely racist worldview. If this were actually the case, it would be quite difficult to reconcile those beliefs with the government’s long history of violence towards American Indians. Even paternalistic concern for a group’s social development should, one would think, discourage acts of genocide.

When one examines other applications of “white man’s burden” thinking—the colonization of Africa, for example—there are clear ulterior motives. Colonies generated huge amounts of wealth for the countries that held them, and were important accessories to nations involved in the centuries-long competition for European hegemony. This pattern explains the assault on American Indian religious practices during the nineteenth century: the U.S. government’s quest to “civilize” was nothing more than a way to justify profitable westward expansion, as indicated by its willingness to resort to violence during the process. However, it does not explain the government’s drive to Christianize American Indians long after they had been forced from their land and were no longer an impediment to wealth extraction.

Perhaps the destruction of Indian culture over the past hundred years was a way to bolster nationalism in the United States in a manner similar to Otto von Bismarck’s kulturkampf in newly unified Germany. Strong national identity is often considered a necessary component to the strength and longevity of an empire: many schools of thought hold that the Western Roman Empire fell in part as a result of “Germanization”—the loss of Roman identity among peoples in its conquered territory—and could have survived if its subjects all spoke Latin and viewed the emperor as one of their countrymen. However, it is utterly ridiculous to think that the survival of Indian cultural identity posed any threat to the unity of the American Empire after 1890, given the extreme population difference between Indians and descendants of settlers. What’s more, Indian culture and American nationalism did not seem to be mutually exclusive. After all, tens of thousands of American Indians served in the United States military throughout the twentieth century.

If not for economic gain or national unity, why did the United States government endorse a policy of ethnocide well into the twentieth century? While racist notions of cultural inferiority were certainly used to justify the pursuit, there have almost always been additional motives behind governmental efforts to stamp out cultural identity. Was the history described in this week’s reading simply an exception to this pattern, or is there more to the issue?