2 - Indigenous Nations and the United States

Summary

The American Revolution freed North American colonists from the restrictions Britain had placed on their encroachments into indigenous lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. The independence of the United States thus catalyzed what became a more than century-long campaign of what this chapter calls settler-led colonialism. This system was characterized by the conquest of indigenous lands, the taking of indigenous resources, and the expulsion of the indigenous people who had for untold millennia served as the stewards and protectors of their ancestral territories. The central goal of settler-led colonialism was clearing the land of indigenous people, by whatever means necessary, and replacing them with white re-settlers, who brought with them their own culture and way of life and, in many cases, enslaved workers. This objective, as historian Patrick Wolfe argues, was inherently genocidal.