An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

NINE

US TRIUMPHALISM

AND PEACETI ME COLONIALISM

There is one fe ature in the expansion of the peoples of white, or

European, blood during the past fo ur centuries which should never

be lost sight of, especially by those who denounce such expansion

on moral grounds. On the whole, the movement has been fraught

with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the

lands over which the expansion took place.

-Theodore Roosevelt, "The Expansion of the White Races," 1909

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back

now fr om this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered

women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the

crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young.

And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud,

and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was

a beautiful dream ... the nation's hoop is broken and scattered.

There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

-Black Elk, 1930, on the massacre at Wounded Knee

Although US imperialism abroad might seem at first to fall outside
the scope of this book, it's important to recognize that the same
methods and strategies that were employed with the Indigenous peo­
ples on the continent were mirrored abroad. While the Indigenous
Americans were being brutally colonized, eliminated, relocated, and
killed, the United States from its beginning was also pursuing over­
seas dominance. Between 1798 and 182 7, the United States inter­
vened militarily twenty-three times from Cuba to Tripoli (Libya)
to Greece. There were seventy-one overseas interventions between

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