Rugged frontier explorers such as Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and others loom large in these histories and supposedly testify to the individual spirit and drive of American settlers as they worked to a build a new country out of the “wilderness.” It’s a story designed to inspire pride and confidence in any American about the heritage and spirit of our country.Įxcept, there’s a lot more to this history than that. Let’s return to the “opening” of the American West where, in the standard telling, settlers and “pioneers” pushed forward and westward from the original 13 states across the Appalachians towards the Mississippi and eventually the Pacific Ocean, forming new settlements in new territories.ĭaniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851–52) by George Caleb Bingham. Scholars consider the United States a settler colony along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Israel, and others. Of course, the settler colony could also center around resource extraction, but the larger goal of settler colonies is to control the space. Rather than more extractive forms of “resource colonialism,” where the goal was to exploit natural resources until those resources ran out, the settler colony was meant to be permanent. This was a distinct form of colonialism built upon the settlement of a geographic space by non-native people and the displacement of the Indigenous communities who lived in that space.
But before I do that, let me outline a key term: settler colonialism. I want to focus on the last example, the “opening” of the American West. If one was to ask a group of Americans to name a few of the formative events in American history, they would be likely to hear Christopher Columbus “discovering the New World” (not exactly related to the United States nor historically accurate but never mind) Pilgrims arriving at Plymouth the Declaration of Independence and Revolutionary War the Civil War and the opening/settling of the West. Many Americans believe the lands that comprise the United States have a fairly recent history of human habitation. And this erasure does not mean that Native cultures do not exist, or that our relationships with the lands on which this settler colony is built are any less valid. The United States was not built out of nothing, and the fact that Indigenous cultures are not part of the dominant American “culture” is a calculated action. Engaging with these histories head-on will open our eyes to facts that run counter to Santorum’s claims. Let’s take this structural myth that Santorum presented, break it apart into its constituent pieces, and explore the histories that have given rise to it. And the implications of this historical erasure have been profound for how we view the very presence and role of Indigenous peoples in contemporary American society.Ī group of Apache Native American children pose for a portrait four months after arriving at Carlisle Industrial Indian School in Pennsylvania, ca. We’ve been conditioned to accept this “whitewashed,” Indigenous-free accounting of the past as a “given” in American history and the construction of this country. In constructing such a history, we conveniently ignore that land theft and Indigenous erasure have quite literally shaped the development of this country. What I mean by this, is that American history has been constructed in a way that completely ignores Indigenous histories and Indigenous presence upon the lands that we now call the “United States.” However, Santorum’s comments point to a much deeper structural myth of the treatment of Native peoples in the United States that Americans have constructed over time. We must call this sort of behavior out when we see it. Santorum’s comments were rightfully criticized as being dismissive of a long history of genocide in the United States against Native peoples and cultures, as well as being historically ignorant. Rick Santorum giving a speech at the Young American Foundation event, 2021. They were given as part of a speech about the beginnings of what we now call the United States, and they have garnered criticism and controversy from a wide spectrum of American society. I mean, there was nothing here.I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture.”įormer Pennsylvania senator (and CNN commentator) Rick Santorum made those comments at a conservative student organization-hosted conference.
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