120 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
thereafter splitting into the present separate small states. In both
cases the larger and stronger unitary federations were subject to eco
nomic intervention and domination by the British and US empires.
Father Miguel Hidalgo, a priest who was instrumental in the
Mexican independence movement, was deeply assimilated into In
digenous society in Mexico, and the majority of the movement's
insurgent fighters were drawn from Indigenous nations. Most of the
actual fighters in the independence movements led by San Martin
and Bolf var in South America were also Indigenous, representing
their communities and nations, fighting for their own liberation as
peoples. In striking contrast, the US war of independence targeted
the Indigenous nations as enemies. The Indigenous communities in
the new South American republics were soon dominated economi
cally and politically by national landed elites that consolidated their
power following the wars of independence. However, Indigenous
peoples whose ancestors fought for liberation from Spanish colo
nialism have never forgotten their important role in those revolu
tionary movements and realize that the liberation process continues.
The Indigenous peoples of Latin America feel they own those revo
lutions, whereas the US secession from Great Britain was the inten
tional founding of a white republic that planned elimination of the
Indigenous peoples as territorial-based, collective societies.
The period of US intervention to annex and dominate former
Spanish territories in the Americas began not in 1898 with the
Spanish-American War, as most history texts claim, but rather nearly
a century before, during Jefferson's presidency, with the Zebulon M.
Pike expedition of 1806-7. Those historians who track "continental
expansion" separately from clear actions of US imperialism rarely
note the juxtaposition in time and presidential administration of the
interventions in North Africa and Mexico on the eve of its liberation
from Spain. Like the Lewis and Clark expedition, completed the
same year that Pike set off, the Pike expedition was a military proj
ect ordered by President Jefferson. Lewis and Clark had headed into
the far reaches of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory to gather
intelligence on the Mandan, Hidatsa, Paiute, Shoshone, Ute, and
many other nations in the huge swath of territory between the Rock-