Historical

How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This lens has an advantage most historical lenses do not: the perpetrators wrote it all down. Settler colonialism in North America was carried out by legislatures and bureaucracies that believed they were doing something admirable, so they kept the treaties, printed the statutes, itemized the acreage, and photographed the children before and after. You do not have to infer the mechanism from its effects. You can read it in the Congressional record. The work of this lens is mostly to put the documents in front of the room and let the government explain itself.

Anchor questions

The United States signed hundreds of treaties with Native nations. You sign treaties with nations. So what was the plan, and when did it change?
Allotment broke collective land into individual plots “for the Indian’s own good,” and two-thirds of the remaining land was gone in fifty years. Was that a failure of the policy or the policy?
Why take the children? What does a school do that an army cannot?
Blood quantum defines Indians by a shrinking fraction. Who benefits from a race that arithmetic eventually ends?
The US, Canada, and Australia all built systems to take Indigenous children, without coordinating. What does that tell you about what you are looking at?
Alcatraz, 1969: the occupiers offered to buy the island in beads at the 1492 rate. What is that argument, and why is it funny?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.

Start with the map

Invasion of America (Claudio Saunt, eHistory, University of Georgia). An interactive animation of every land cession, roughly 1.5 billion acres, playing out across two minutes of screen time. Open a session with it. Nobody argues with it, and everybody remembers it. Free: experience.arcgis.com

The narrative

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (b. 1938), An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014). The spine of this lens: four centuries told as settler colonialism rather than as westward expansion, with Native nations as political actors making decisions rather than as scenery being cleared. On standpoint, plainly: Dunbar-Ortiz is a historian of Indigenous struggle who describes Cherokee descent and is not tribally enrolled. Shared with the anti-Blackness theme. Free to borrow: archive.org
Vine Deloria Jr. (1933 to 2005), Custer Died for Your Sins (1969). A Standing Rock Sioux lawyer rewriting the terms in public, with a chapter on anthropologists so brutal that anthropologists still cite it defensively. The founding text of Red Power’s intellectual wing, and much funnier than its reputation. Free to borrow: archive.org

The documents, in the government’s own hand

This is the section to build a session on. Everything here is the state describing what it is doing while it does it.

Kappler’s Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties (Oklahoma State University). Seven volumes of the treaty texts, searchable. Pick the treaty covering the ground your room is sitting on and read the promises aloud. Free: dc.library.okstate.edu
The Dawes Act (1887). The mechanism, legislated. Break the collective title, issue individual plots, declare the rest surplus, sell it. Two-thirds of remaining Native land was gone within fifty years, which was not the accident of the policy but its function. Free: archives.gov
Paul Spruhan, A Legal History of Blood Quantum in Federal Indian Law to 1935 (2006). How the state arrived at defining a people by a fraction. Fifty-one free pages, technical, and the clearest single view of elimination as administration rather than violence. Free: red.library.usd.edu
Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (Dickinson College). Three hundred thousand documents, including the before-and-after photographs taken to demonstrate that the method worked. Shared with this theme’s experiential lens, where it sits deliberately beside survivors’ own accounts. Free: carlisleindian.dickinson.edu

The schools, and three countries that built them

Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report (Bryan Newland, Department of the Interior, 2022). The United States investigating itself: at least 408 schools, burial sites at dozens. It exists because Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet secretary, ordered it, which is worth noticing about how long it took. Free: bia.gov
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (2015). Thousands of survivor statements, a finding of cultural genocide, and 94 Calls to Action. Free: nctr.ca
Bringing Them Home (Australian Human Rights Commission, 1997). The Stolen Generations. Free: humanrights.gov.au (this host blocks automated checks; it is live)

Put those three beside Carlisle. Three states, three continents, no coordination, one instrument: take the children. That convergence is the strongest single piece of evidence for Wolfe’s claim in the theoretical lens that this is a structure rather than a series of events.

Red Power

Indians of All Tribes, Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People (Alcatraz, 1969). They claim the island by right of discovery, offer to buy it in beads and red cloth at the 1492 exchange rate, and note that it already resembles most reservations: no running water, no industry, and the population has always exceeded the land’s capacity. Two pages, and it is a complete theory of the thing delivered as a joke. Free: americanyawp.com
American Indian Movement, Trail of Broken Treaties 20-Point Position Paper (1972). Twenty demands taken to Washington: restore treaty-making, honor the treaties, deal with nations as nations. From AIM’s own archive. Free: aimovement.org
Nick Estes on Thanksgiving, Settler Colonialism and Continuing Indigenous Resistance (Democracy Now!, 2019, 14 min). About 97,000 views. Estes (Kul Wicasa) in a quarter hour, hung on a holiday the room already has feelings about. Free: youtube.com

Beyond North America

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020). Khalidi reads Zionism as a settler-colonial formation, and says so in the subtitle. This is scholarship, not epithet: Patrick Wolfe wrote on Palestine himself, and settler colonial studies has treated the comparison as central since the field began. A theme about elimination for land that stops at the American border has described a country rather than a structure. Read with Imperialism and the Global System, which carries the rest of the Palestine material. No borrowable copy. Paywalled: us.macmillan.com, and see the note on access.

A note on method

The temptation with this lens is to treat the documents as shocking. They are not shocking; they are minutes. The Dawes Act is not a confession, it is a bill, drafted by people who thought they were being generous, debated in public, and passed. Carlisle’s photographs were promotional. The right question for a room is not “how could they” but “what did they think they were doing, and why did it seem reasonable, and what is being drafted in that register right now.”

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. It is built on primary sources, because the state documented itself thoroughly. Real gaps, named. There is no free authorized film on Wounded Knee 1973: the PBS episode’s stream has expired and nothing else verified, which is a hole in the Red Power section. Indigenous-authored histories of the boarding schools and Red Power (Brenda Child, David Treuer) have no borrowable copies and are not yet here as paywalled entries; the scholarly history in this lens is currently written by settlers, and the survivors are in the experiential lens instead, which is a division worth fixing rather than defending. Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian history is absent. Contributions welcome, especially from Native historians.

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