Stages of Conquest

The Native American nations have suffered nearly complete conquest by the descendants of white Europeans, both from the outside and from the inside. From the outside, by physical conquest, and from the inside, by conversion to religious views that tend to justify white superiority. Not much is left except the glowing coals of cultural identity and even these can be, as in the case of my own Cherokee tribe, which is more white than red, very dim.

There have been at least three stages of this conquest. Starting over 500 years ago, Europeans came to North and South America and began killing and enslaving natives, taking their land, and introducing diseases that decimated their populations. This mostly occurred on the east coast. Many Native American tribes moved westward to get away from this conquest. This resulted in a westward push, in which eastern tribes pushed other tribes toward the west, compressing them and forcing them into conflict. Many of the intertribal conflicts were therefore caused indirectly by Europeans.

In some cases, smaller tribes took refuge with larger ones, merging with them even if they kept their own cultural identity. Therefore by the 1800s the larger tribes contained smaller ones. For example, the Coushattas, Yuchis, and Natchis were compressed into the Muskogee Creek tribe, and some of the Ottawas, Quapaws, and Delawares into the Cherokee tribe. This was the first stage of conquest: Europeans compressed smaller tribes into the larger ones.

The second stage was when the United States conquered the larger tribes. For the Cherokees and Muskogees, this was the Trail of Tears during the 1830s. When the Cherokees and Muskogees (as well as three other tribes) were forced into what is now Oklahoma, the remnants of the smaller tribes went with them. When what became Indian Territory was divided among the “Five Civilized Tribes,” individuals of the smaller tribes had allotments within the land of the larger tribes. To this day, you can find Quapaws living among Cherokees in northeastern Oklahoma, and Yuchis with the Creeks. For years, driving between Durant and Tulsa, Oklahoma, I passed through Wetumka, a little town which happens to be the headquarters of the Alabama Quassarte Tribal Town. I did not know it existed until they got a storefront building and painted a sign on it. I searched online to find out who they were. Quassarte is a variant form of Coushatta.

We often think of this second stage of conquest as the first: independent tribes got conquered by Europeans and later Americans. But in many cases, smaller tribes were conquered by Americans only after Americans had forced them to take refuge with larger tribes.

The third stage occurred when Americans swindled from the Natives the land allotments that the government had given them. In Oklahoma, this occurred immediately before and after statehood in 1907. For example, the conquered Creek people were given land allotments, with the Yuchi and Coushatta among them, but white swindlers, in collusion with white judges, quickly took these allotments away from them. In many cases they did so by forged deeds that claimed the Natives had sold the land to them; or, the white land speculators lied about the amount of money they were paying for the land by conveniently misplacing a decimal point so that the Native seller ended up getting only one-tenth as much money as he or she was promised. In many cases, Native children (and adults) were placed under “guardianship” and the “guardians” kept most of the money for themselves. In a few cases, the swindlers got the Natives to leave the land to them as heirs, and then they killed the Natives. In such ways, the large tribes were conquered a second time, and the small tribes a third time.

This is the reason that many Natives in Oklahoma live in desperate poverty even though their land allotments a hundred years ago often contained rich reserves of oil. And this poverty is evident if you drive through Native communities in the midst of rich oil land. Consider Wetumka, the city where the Alabama Quassarte Tribal Town is located. For the first few years I drove through, nearly every building I saw was dilapidated. Then new buildings began to arise, very fancy and rich amidst the rubble of the old buildings. The first was, of course, a bank. Next came two buildings associated with providing medical care to the Natives. You see, many of the Native Americans rely on health care at government expense because they are poor; and they are poor because white Americans stole their land.

The Americans who stole the land reaped immense private profits, but the conquered Natives must now be assisted at public expense. Private corporations got the profits, while the taxpayers ended up with the costs. This happens a lot. For example, tobacco corporations got rich while taxpayers paid medical expenses of people who got cancer and emphysema. It was not until the tobacco lawsuit that was settled in 1999 that the tobacco corporations ever paid any money for the damage that their products did, and then only a small portion of it. A similar thing will soon happen with global warming: the Koch Brothers get rich from oil and carbon pollution, but when it comes time to build sea walls to keep the rising ocean waters out of Miami, it will be at public expense. But when you see the poverty of Native American communities, you see the human face of private profits at public expense, and the lingering evidence of the white conquest of Native American nations.