An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

Conclusion: The Future of the United States 229

colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands" that

allows the United States "to cast its imperialist gaze globally" with

"what is essentially a settler colony's national construction of itself

as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy," while

"the status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by

the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d'etre."

Here Byrd quotes Lakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who spells

out the connection between the "Indian wars" and the Iraq War:

The current mission of the United States to become the center

of political enlightenment to be taught to the rest of the world

began with the Indian wars and has become the dangerous

provocation of this nation's historical intent. The historical con­

nection between the Little Big Horn event and the "uprising" in

Baghdad must become part of the political dialogue of Amer­

ica if the fiction of decolonization is to happen and the hoped­

for deconstruction of the colonial story is to come about. 24

A "race to innocence" is what occurs when individuals assume
that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and
oppression.25 This concept captures the understandable assump­
tion made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to
any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what
occurred in their adopted country's past. Neither are those who are
already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners,
Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society
that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma
was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behav­
ior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and
the children of recent immigrants.
In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen
in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent
on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social
services and quality public education; the gross profits of corpora­
tions, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than
half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide
few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation