THE NEW ORDER
The Birth of a Nation 79Wars continued for another century, unrelentingly and without
pause, and the march across the continent used the same strategy
and tactics of scorched earth and annihilation with increasingly
deadly firepower. Somehow, even "genocide" seems an inadequate
description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with hor
ror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country's manifest
destiny.
With the consolidation of the new state, the United States of
America, by 1790, the opportunity for Indigenous nations to negoti
ate alliances with competing European empires against the despised
settlers who intended to destroy them was greatly narrowed. Nev
ertheless, Indigenous nations had defied the founding of the inde
pendent United States in a manner that allowed for their survival
and created a legacy-a culture of resistance-that has persisted. By
the time of the birth of the US republic, Indigenous peoples in what
is now the continental United States had been resisting European
colonization for two centuries. They had no choice given the aspira
tions of the colonizers: total elimination of Native nations or sur
vival. Precolonial Indigenous societies were dynamic social systems
with adaptation built into them. Fighting for survival did not require
cultural abandonment. On the contrary, the cultures used already
existing strengths, such as diplomacy and mobility, to develop new
mechanisms required to live in nearly constant crisis. There is always
a hard core of resistance in that process, but the culture of resistance
also includes accommodations to the colonizing social order, includ
ing absorbing Christianity into already existing religious practices,
using the colonizer's language, and intermarrying with settlers and,
more importantly, with other oppressed groups, such as escaped Af
rican slaves. Without the culture of resistance, surviving Indigenous
peoples under US colonization would have been eliminated through
individual assimilation.
A new element was added in the independent Anglo-American le
gal regime: treaty making. The US Constitution specifically refers to
Indigenous nations only once, but significantly, in Article r, Section