From continental empire to world empire

NATIVE AMERICAN organizations across the U.S. are objecting to the use of "Geronimo" as the code name for Osama bin Laden in the operation that led to his assassination last week. The military's message to the White House after bin Laden's murder was "Geronimo EKIA"--Enemy Killed In Action.

Geronimo was an Apache leader who, with a small number of warriors, fought off 8,000 U.S. and Mexican troops in the mountains of Arizona and Mexico until his surrender and life imprisonment in 1886. "It's another attempt to label Native Americans as terrorists," remarked Paula Antoine, a member of the South Dakota Rosebud Sioux.

This isn't an isolated case. A recent Associated Press report states, "The Seminole tribe of Florida is still waiting to for an apology from Obama over a court brief filed earlier this year that compared the tribe's ancestors to al-Qaeda." Here's what the brief--defending the conviction of Yemeni Ali Hamza al Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence imposed by a military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay--said:

[N]ot only was the Seminole belligerency unlawful, but, much like modern-day al-Qaeda, the very way in which the Seminoles waged war against U.S. targets itself violated the customs and usages of war.

This is the age-old complaint of conquerors--one voiced by British generals during the American Revolution--that the people they were trying to destroy wouldn't stand out in the open to be shot, but instead engaged in "unfair" and "unlawful" warfare.

The complaint in this case comes from a representative of a government that spent centuries unlawfully depriving Native Americans of their land, their dignity and their lives.

"Apparently, having an African American president in the White House is not enough to overturn the more than 200-year American tradition of treating and thinking of Indians as enemies of the United States," wrote columnist Steven Newcomb in Indian Country Today in response to the Geronimo revelations.

The U.S. military's use of the code name "Geronimo" is not only part of a tradition of seeing Indian nations as enemies; it's part of a tradition of directly linking the conquest of this continent with overseas expansion and imperialism--something missed by some of the criticisms of the administration that object to the comparison between bin Laden and Geronimo, but are supportive of the U.S. military.

Jefferson Keel, president of National Congress of American Indians, for example, described bin Laden as a "shared enemy" of Native and non-native Americans.

But to object to the use by U.S. officials of racist anti-Indian code names and at the same time applaud U.S. militarism is a highly contradictory position--for Indian code names (along with Indian-named helicopters, battleships and missiles) reflect the historical continuity, often quite consciously expressed, between the mass murder and dispossession of Native Americans (continental "manifest destiny") with the projection of U.S. power beyond its continental borders (imperialist "manifest destiny").

The connection between the two is hardly ever directly drawn today; it's done indirectly through the use of Indian names for U.S. weaponry (Apache helicopters) and U.S. enemies.

You would be hard pressed by find an apologist for U.S. imperialism today drawing positive connections between the conquest of Native Americans and the invasion of Iraq. Yet in the early years of American overseas expansion, the comparison was commonplace.

The Indian-hating racism of earlier eras justified the conquest of the continent, the dispossession of millions of Native peoples of their land, the annihilation of their cultures and of whole peoples.

But this Indian hating did not stop at the borders of what became the U.S.; it became a template that continued to inform the conquest of new "frontiers," as the U.S. began to cast itself as a world power.

As the U.S. went from "winning the West" to conquering the world, its statesmen and soldiers now considered the new "frontiers" they sought to conquer and subdue "Indian country," its peoples "savages" who required being either "civilized" or exterminated.

THE CONNECTION was clear from the beginning. In President William McKinley's whistle stops in the West during his 1898 off-year election tour, references in his speeches to Admiral George Dewey's victory over the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay (signaling the beginning of the conquest of the Philippines) prompted chants of "Westward Ho!" from excited crowds.

The conquest of the Philippines was justified on the same grounds as the conquest of the American West--that the "natives" were a motley collection of uncivilized, tribal groups incapable of forming an independent nation.

The Schurman Commission's report on the Philippines rejected calling the archipelago a colony of the U.S., opting instead for the precedent of territorial governments established in the Western U.S. after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which gave the U.S. ownership over a giant tract of land west of the Mississippi inhabited by hundreds of Indian nations.

The report noted that Jefferson had been willing to adapt the principles of the Declaration of Independence "to the condition of the native"--that is, to deny Indians the right of self-determination.

As McKinley's running mate, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech (one of many) in Grand Rapids in 1900 that declared, "not one competent witness who has actually known the facts believes the Filipinos capable of self-government at present."

"To grant self-government to Luzon under Aguinaldo," he insisted, "would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief." Calling Aguinaldo's rebellion a "Tagal insurrection," he compared it to that of the Seminoles in Florida, asserting that if the "consent of the governed" did not apply to continental territories the U.S. was fighting Indians over, it didn't apply to the Philippines either.

"The reasoning which justifies our having made war against Sitting Bull," he concluded, "also justifies our having checked the outbreaks of Aguinaldo and his followers."

Many of the officers, and some of the soldiers, sent over to defeat the nationalist movement in the Philippines in 1899 had in fact been "Indian fighters" in the U.S. Major Gen. Henry Lawton was one. Geronimo and his band surrendered to Lawton in 1886.

The Filipinos were wary of U.S. claims that it was seeking only to liberate the Philippines from Spanish rule. A secret cable to Secretary of State John Hay from the head of a commission sent to the Philippines reported that the Filipino rebels were "exceedingly skeptical of our intentions," citing the treatment of American Indians as one of the reasons.

They had every reason to be suspicious. By the summer of 1902, almost 127,000 U.S. soldiers had fought to turn the Philippines into an American colony, causing the deaths of at least a quarter of a million Filipinos.

As historian Richard Drinnon notes, "McKinley's administration treated the Filipinos under Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo as though they were a band of Sitting Bull's Sioux or Geronimo's Apaches." Major Gen. Ewell S. Otis, the commander of the U.S. forces in the Philippines, wrote that his task was to make the Filipinos "good Indians."

Officials justified atrocities committed by U.S. forces in the Philippines by citing precedents for similar acts committed against Indians.

Secretary of State Elihu Root, for example, justified the scorched-earth policy of Gen. Jacob H. Smith, who called for his troops to turn the interior of Samar into a "howling wilderness" and to kill every male above the age of 10, by citing Gen. William T. Sherman's recommendations in 1866 after Sioux warriors had wiped out a detachment of 80 U.S. troops that had invaded Sioux territory.

"We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux," Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, "even to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else will reach the root of this case."

USING THE term "Indian Country" to describe enemy territory was also commonplace during the Vietnam War. As part of this template, soldiers called military bases near territory controlled by the National Liberation Front "Fort Apaches."

U.S. military training included showing Westerns. In the John Wayne film about Vietnam, The Green Berets, the Vietnamese nationalist fighters "whoop" like Indians. A bit of graffiti written on a military latrine in Saigon went, "'We'll bring peace to this land if we have to kill them all.' (signed) General Custer."

The parallels of Vietnam with the Philippines war are striking. Just as Jake Smith instructed his men to kill any male over the age of 10, foot soldier Robert A. Kruch recounted how his colonel told him no more prisoners--"I want a body count."

From then on, Kruch reported, he was told by his commanding officer to shoot at any male over the age of 12. One veteran who had taken part in the My Lai massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children talked later about how the soldiers in Vietnam got "scalps, you know, like from Indians. Some people were on an Indian trip over there."

In his autobiography, the Lakota holy man Lame Deer compared the U.S. 7th Cavalry's 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of 150 Lakota men, women and children with the U.S. Army massacre of 500 villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, in 1968. "My Lai was hot, and Wounded Knee was icy cold," he wrote, "and that's the only difference."

The Indian references continue.

During preparations for the 1991 invasion of Iraq known as Desert Storm, Marine Brig. Gen. Richard Neal referred to Iraqi-held territory in Kuwait as "Indian Country." When Native Americans protested, Lt. Col. John Tull, a spokesman for the U.S. military Central Command in Saudi Arabia, explained that the term "Indian Country" was also used in Vietnam to refer to hostile territory.

"I am not exactly sure where it originated," he explained. "If you think in common sense terms, where might it have come from? From the days of the Wild West and something like that."

A January 2002 article in the Washington Times referred to Osama bin Laden's followers as "Indians."

A Los Angeles Times staff writer in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2004 wrote this:

This is what the war has come down to in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, where providing tenuous security harks back to America's 19th century Indian Wars--a time when the cavalry set up outposts and forts in decidedly hostile territory. Ramadi is Indian Country--'the wild, wild West,' as the region is called.

An embedded reporter's New York Post article on his experience with U.S. troops in Anbar Province in 2007 was headlined "Indian Country."

THE WESTWARD expansion was, in the words of author Tom Holm, "a tawdry affair of land swindles, double-dealing, fraud, murder, power plays, greed and theft." So what is the value for American imperialism in continuing to draw the analogy?

Isn't calling Iraq or Afghanistan "Indian country" just another way of admitting that the U.S. is once again violating with utmost brutality the sovereignty of other nations--and justifying it with racist ideology about the inherent savagery of the enemy--for the purposes of acquiring land and resources?

This was certainly the conclusion drawn by many people during the Vietnam War.

At the same time, however, that the Indian was denigrated as a wild, bestial savage worthy only of being "civilized" or exterminated, the Indian has also been portrayed as a super-warrior, an inherently martial, brave and formidable foe, capable of blending into the landscape and attacking without warning, and then melting away into the surrounding countryside.

Holm zooms in on the reason the U.S., and especially its military, continues to reference the "winning of the West" in its overseas wars:

When a crusty Gunnery Sergeant in Vietnam told a new group of boots to the bush that "out there is Indian country and this is Fort Apache," he was reminding them that if stalwart Americans can overcome Indians in the American saga, they could surely vanquish another sneaky, non-white, but ultimately dangerous enemy.

There are indeed many important differences between Geronimo and Osama bin Laden.

Geronimo was one of many great Indians who fought for his people's freedom and right to exist. Osama bin Laden was a former a wealthy Saudi businessman who collaborated with the U.S. and Pakistan to fight the Russians in Afghanistan and then organized a loose terrorist network that has largely targeted people who were not responsible for American imperialism, really doing little more than giving Washington a pretext for its post-Cold War moves to strengthen its hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East.

We should not let these important differences, however, prevent us from recognizing this: The U.S. has always justified its conquests, and its own, far more violent, far more bloody, terror, by calling its opponents "savages" and "terrorists."

The use of Indian names for its enemies should be strong reminder of the logical link between Washington's genocidal wars on this continent and its wars of conquest abroad.