US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism 167homa, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they
ate, sang hymns, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed
posses supported by police and militias stopped the revolt, which
became known as the Green Corn Rebellion. Those who didn't get
away were arrested and received prison sentences. The rebellion is
today considered as the waning voice of the people pushed off the
land, but it also reflects the crisis induced by the forced allotment
of Indigenous territories and the reality of a multiethnic resistance
movement, a rare occurrence in US colonialist history. 9
At the same time, landless Indigenous farmers were launching a
revolution in Mexico. Before President Wilson put General John J.
Pershing at the head of the American Expeditionary Forces in Eu
rope in 1917 , the president had sent him to lead troops, mainly buf
falo soldiers, inside Mexico for nearly a year to stop the revolution
in the north led by Francisco "Pancho" Villa. The military interven
tion did not go well. Even the Mexican federal troops fighting Villa
resented the presence of US soldiers. About the only notable success
for the US military expedition was the killing of Villa's second-in
command by a young lieutenant named George Patton. 10
MARKETS KILL
The extension of US military power into the Pacific and Caribbean
was not militarism for its own sake. Rather, it was all about secur
ing markets and natural resources, developing imperialist power
to protect and extend corporate wealth. Indigenous peoples in the
United States were severely affected by US industrialization and the
development of corporations. In a study of corporations in Indian
Te rritory, historian H. Craig Miner defines the corporation as "an
organization legally authorized by charter to act as a single indi
vidual, characterized by the issuance of stock and the limitation of
liability of its stockholders to the amount of their respective invest
ment ... an artificial person that could not be held accountable in a
manner familiar to the American Indian way of thinking. Individual
responsibility could be masked in corporate personality ... a legal
abstraction."11