An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

CONCLUSION

THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

That the continued colonization of American Indian nations,

peoples, and lands provides the United States the economic

and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze

globally is a fa ct that is simultaneously obvious within-

and yet continually obscured by-what is essentially a settler

colony's national construction of itself as an ever more perfect

multicultural, multiracial democracy .... [T]he status of

American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the

United States continues to haunt and inflect its ra ison d'etre.

-Jodi Byrd

The conventional narrative of US history routinely segregates the
"Indian wars" as a subspecialization within the dubious category
"the West." Then there are the westerns, those cheap novels, movies,
and television shows that nearly every US American imbibed with
mother's milk and that by the mid-twentieth century were popular
in every corner of the world.1 The architecture of US world domi­
nance was designed and tested by this period of continental US mili­
tarism, which built on the previous hundred years and generated its
own innovations in total war. The opening of the twenty-first cen­
tury saw a new, even more brazen form of US militarism and impe­
rialism explode on the world scene when the election of George W.
Bush turned over control of US foreign policy to a long-gestating
neoconservative and warmongering faction of the Pentagon and its
civilian hawks. Their subsequent eight years of political control in­
cluded two major military invasions and hundreds of small wars em­
ploying US Special Forces around the globe, establishing a template
that continued after their political power waned.

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