Pierre Du Pont. Theodore Roosevelt. Howard Zinn.
The inhabitants of your country districts regard – wrongly, it is true – Indians and forests as natural enemies which must be exterminated by fire and sword and brandy, in order that they may seize their territory. They regard themselves, and their prosperity, as collateral heirs to all the magnificent portion of land which God has created from Cumberland and Ohio to the Pacific Ocean. Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours; letter to Thomas Jefferson, 17 December 1801.
Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion. That the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their retrogression or conquest, is due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost their fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway. Theodore Roosevelt, 1901.
The physical attack on and decimation of the native population, as well as their expulsion from their lands, was accompanied by a cultural assault. Under late 19th and early 20th-century “assimilation” policies, the vanquished were coerced by various means into emulating their conquerors, the idea being that identifiable remnants of [First Nations] societies would disappear. Another part of the process was to keep secret from generations of Americans the cruelties that lay the euphemism “Westward Expansion”. The secrets were buried, never to appear in textbooks, popular entertainment, or general histories of the country. Howard Zinn, 1996.
