The Indian Question

_{This article was submitted to Amerikaner by Grant Norman. If you would like to submit your own content to Amerikaner.org, please email AmerikanerContributions@Proton.me}

In today’s America, there is no shortage of things to complain about. Matters of economics, crime, and degeneracy swirl together into an unbearable typhoon, and while there are those who emphasize certain elements of the catastrophe over others, there is broad agreement that there is something wrong in all spheres of American life.

Much attention has been given to the ills of Critical Race Theory in education and the accompanying push for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” in businesses and government, even among those who were previously politically unaware. But the attention these initiatives give to the role of slavery in American history has proven to be a smokescreen from one of the largest narratives that pose a threat to the Amerikaner as a people.

While it is popular among establishment types on both the left and right to decry slavery as the “original sin” of the United States, the real sin which has been imposed on their subjects in the Heartland and the West has been so long accepted that it passes without mention. To the world, the so-called “genocide” of the American Indians by White settlers is the real founding crime of the North American continent. This assumption has been so ingrained that it is scarcely commented upon when brought up.

The allegations of genocide and “settler colonialism” provide the reference point for leftist critiques of Israel and for anti-American Europeans. Even Adolf Hitler, consumer of cowboy novels that he was, bought into the myth of the noble Indian savage vanquished by the perfidious hordes which came across the Atlantic Ocean. As long as Heritage Americans held sway in the United States, this accusation bore little power. Among the genteel, it was seen as an embarrassing incident, on the same level as having a distant relative in the madhouse, while ordinary, salt of the earth Amerikaners chose to honor the fallen foes with the names of towns, sports teams, and military helicopters.

Claiming Indian ancestry is still a popular fixation among Baby Boomers, and this feeling towards the Indians is something which sets the American example apart from the modern depiction of colonialism as rapacious exploitation and needless brutality. No Israeli politician would highlight his Palestinian Arab heritage like an American politician would, to say nothing about lying about that heritage as Senator Elizabeth Warren did. The changing fortunes of White Americans over the past decades means that the incident which was once seen as an embarrassing foible has become a bludgeon with which the real invaders of the continent use to abuse the native population they are displacing.

No one speaks of actually returning land or sovereignty to the tribes which have been allowed to exist in their ghettos across the continent. Rather, the only goal is to take things from Whitey.

The escalation of rhetoric can be seen in the way which the conflict between the Minnesota and the Dakota Indians has been painted from an uprising to a war to a massacre (not of the White women and children, but rather referring to the execution of the savages who murdered them). But even the allowance of the White conquest of North America as a messy affair in which the noble Indian was displaced to be remembered fondly is a perversion of the authentic American attitude towards the settling of America.

For the bulk of the country during the nineteenth century, the struggle between Americans and Indians was an undoubtedly moral conflict. For every crime which bleary-eyed East Coast activists pointed to on the White side of the ledger, there were more than ample counter-examples of scalping, rape, and infanticide. Even Andrew Jackson, the great Indian-Killer in the imagination of today’s academics, was far more ambivalent towards the Indian tribes than his countrymen were. His so-called Trail of Tears, hardly any harsher than the journey which Americans made to settle the West, was offered as a salve to the Indians to save them from war with Georgian Whites. The only options Jackson saw for preserving the Indians of the Southeast from destruction were removal to the West or turning American guns on American citizens to protect subject peoples.

Because of the steady erosion of the American story, and its replacement by the myth of evil Whites attacking, exploiting, and subjecting every other race under the sun, the people of the American Heartland find themselves the first target of the erasure of America as a land and American as an identity. For every conservative who argues “well, I never owned a slave”, the rejoinder is immediately provided, “but you are living on stolen land!” Only a people who can provide a steadfast defense of their home will survive. Those who adopt the cowardly soul of the spiritual liberal will be swept away by a people confident in their past righteousness and their future destiny.

As real as jewish power and black criminality are in the United States today, these conflicts do not matter narratively the way that the Indian Question does. The vital importance of enslaved Africans to America’s fortunes presupposes the necessity of the men who brought them over. The ethnic hatreds and perversions of jews are transfers of Old-World peculiarities to our shores, but they remain fundamentally alien.

Only the supposed “theft” of the continent from its “rightful owners” cuts to the marrow of the Amerikaner nation and the American people. Without a homeland to claim as his own, the Amerikaner will be adrift and vulnerable like other stateless people in the world today. This is not to say that the Indian himself holds any real power in the country. He is a bludgeon used by those with far greater power, influence, and ambition than him, but the Indian Question will remain a useful bludgeon until we reject it.

Our ancestors were not monsters, but heroes. We owe it to them to defend their legacy and to build the country they wanted for us.