Evil Empire 51What White Supremacists Know
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
the united states has been at war every day since its founding, often
covertly and often in several parts of the world at once. As ghastly as that
sentence is, it still does not capture the full picture. Indeed, prior to its
founding, what would become the United States was engaged—as it would
continue to be for more than a century following—in internal warfare to
piece together its continental territory. Even during the Civil War, both
the Union and Confederate armies continued to war against the nations of
the Diné and Apache, the Cheyenne and the Dakota, inflicting hideous
massacres upon civilians and forcing their relocations. Yet when consid-
ering the history of U.S. imperialism and militarism, few historians trace
their genesis to this period of internal empire-building. They should. The
origin of the United States in settler colonialism—as an empire born from
the violent acquisition of indigenous lands and the ruthless devaluation of
indigenous lives—lends the country unique characteristics that matter when
considering questions of how to unhitch its future from its violent DNA.
The United States is not exceptional in the amount of violence or
bloodshed when compared to colonial conquests in Africa, Asia, the