FIVE
THE BIRTH OF A NATION
Our nation was born in genocide .... We are perhaps
the only nation which tried as a matter of national
policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover,
we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade.
Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves
to reject or fe el remorse fo r this shameful episode.
-Martin Luther King Jr.The British withdrew from the fight to maintain their thirteen
colonies in 1783, in order to redirect their resources to the conquest
of South Asia. The British East India Company had been operat
ing in the subcontinent since 1600 in a project parallel to Britain's
colonization of the North American Atlantic Coast. Britain's trans
fer to the United States of its claim to the Ohio Country spelled
a nightmarish disaster for all Indigenous peoples east of the Mis
sissippi. Britain's withdrawal in 1783 did not end military actions
against Indigenous peoples but rather was a prelude to unrestrained
violent colonization of the continent. In negotiations to end the
war, Britain did not insist on consideration for the Indigenous na
tions that resisted the settlers' war of secession. In the resulting 1783
Treaty of Paris, the Crown transferred to the United States owner
ship of all its territory south of the Great Lakes, from the Mississippi
to the Atlantic, and north of Spanish-occupied Florida. Muskogee
Creek leader Alexander McGillivray expressed the general Indig
enous view: "To find ourselves and country betrayed to our enemies
and divided between the Spaniards and Americans is cruel and un
generous."1