PHILIP J. DELORIA on Native American History
“There has not been a treaty made between the United States and American Indians that has not been broken by the United States.”
From the time the early European settlers landed in North America, they acted as if the land they occupied was theirs—in part because a European royal leader had deeded it to them. These settlers saw the Natives they encountered as temporary—if not bothersome—occupants of this deeded land.
That the Natives’ ancestors had lived on this land for centuries, if not millennia, was ignored. Indeed, the original sin of slavery to which African Americans were subjected was matched by the original sin of expropriation, deceit, violence, and murder to which American Indians were subjected by the early settlers (and their descendants).
The difference to some extent was that African Americans were unwillingly imported into the colonies and then the United States, while American Indians were peacefully occupying the lands first settled by their ancestors. Indeed, when Christopher Columbus first arrived in the Western Hemisphere, there were already perhaps tens of millions of these Indigenous people on the continent, living in civilized, healthy, and prosperous ways, in several hundred different tribes.
How did these people lose their land, their lifestyles, their culture, and the bulk of their population over the ensuing several hundred years?
That is a complicated question, but the European settlers at first, and in time their American descendants, felt entitled to the land and its resources. They believed their civilization had a superior culture, religion, language, and life purpose. That entitlement gave the colonialists the belief that they were doing God’s work in creating a country where whites of European descent controlled the Indians’ fate.
Indians were given essentially no rights in the country created by the Constitution. They were not citizens, and they could not integrate into the society being built on the lands that their ancestors had long occupied. And agreements entered into between Indians and the U.S. government were repeatedly and violently broken by the government over a two-century period.
The result is that the Indian population today is modest compared to what it might otherwise have been. Fewer than five million Americans are considered Native. About half of that population lives on reservations, which are areas set aside by the U.S. government for Native Americans to occupy (but not own). Sadly, reservations have not been paradises; rather, they are well known for their intense challenges, including high alcohol, drug, poverty, and suicide rates.
This may be a difficult story for many Americans to believe. But the story is true. In recent decades, scholars have done heroic work in assembling the facts about the lives of Indians in the United States, long ago and now, and they have written eloquently about these facts.
One of the leading scholars of the Indian experience in the United States has long been Philip J. Deloria of Harvard University. I interviewed him virtually on September 4, 2020, in connection with a series at the New-York Historical Society.
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): You are a professor of Native American history at Harvard, a university that has been around for almost four hundred years. In four hundred years, there had never been a tenured professor of American Indian history at Harvard. Was that a surprise to you?
PHILIP J. DELORIA (PD): I’m not really surprised. We measure Harvard in centuries; we measure American Indian history, as an academic pursuit, in decades. It’s part of the efforts of many institutions of higher education to take seriously Native American histories—not simply as something that sits within American history per se but as valid, separate, and distinct histories of their own, which intersect with American history but are also autonomous.
Native American history has been growing for the last fifty or sixty years. In the last two or three decades it has attracted much more interest, particularly as we’ve made arguments for the distinctiveness of the Native American experience and its centrality to the United States.
DR: When I was in school, we were told that Christopher Columbus didn’t actually get to North America. He saw a few Caribbean Natives and called them Indians because he thought he was in India.
PD: That is why we call Native people Indians, yes. He ended up in the Caribbean. He did a number of voyages. We think about his first voyage and we think about discovery. But what’s really interesting is to go back and consider his relationships with the Indigenous people of the Caribbean.
One of the first things he did on his first voyage was to capture several Native people and take them back to Spain. His second voyage was quite explicitly a slaving voyage. He planned to capture as many Native people as he could—which he did—and bring them back to Spain to be sold in the slave markets.
When we think about slavery in America, we tend to think about it as a story of chattel slavery, of African slavery. But slavery actually begins in the New World with Columbus and the enslavement of Indigenous peoples.
DR: How many Native Americans were on the continent of North America around the time Columbus came over?
PD: These numbers have been debated. As we know, one of the things that Europeans brought was epidemic disease, which killed off many Native people—from 70 to 90 percent of the populations in some areas. It’s an interesting history for us to think about when we’re contemplating our own contemporary world, so vulnerable to pandemic.
Those population numbers have ranged from as high as 100 million people for the hemisphere to something on the order of 7.5 million people in North America. Scholars derive those numbers from many different methods, thinking about the carrying capacity of land, and social organization, and these kinds of things. A reasonable consensus for the population of the Americas in 1492 is around 50–60 million people.
One of the things we can say for certain is that the number of Native people here was dramatically reduced, to the point where environmental change actually ensued—the growing of massive forests, the proliferation of certain animal species. Many people have taken this as a marker of a moment when, literally, the planet changed because of human-caused effects.
DR: As you say, some people have said there were as many as 100 million Native Americans around the time Columbus came over. That went down to maybe 10 million. Was it the diseases brought from Europe that Native Americans were not able to withstand, or the Europeans killing them?
PD: It’s pretty clear that epidemic disease is the major cause. But it’s been very easy for people to say, “Oh, disease! What could anyone have done about that?” There’s a way in which the language of disease, and the way we teach and talk about disease, is letting some other important factors off the hook.
One of the more interesting books of the last decade has been Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery, in which he points out that when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, it took almost twenty-five years for smallpox to arrive. And yet the amount of indigenous death in the Caribbean was extraordinary.
One of the things Reséndez has argued—quite correctly, in my view—is that slavery and violence and genocidal killing destroyed people before disease even arrived. And when disease does arrive, what do the Spanish do? They double down on the captivity, and the killing, and the violence against Native people. Jeff Ostler has extended this argument to other times and places: colonialism is the critical context for understanding Native population declines.
DR: Native Americans were thought to have come over when there was a land bridge between Russia and what’s now Alaska. Is that correct? How long ago was it that they came?
PD: This has been one of the most interesting things that’s been happening in our field. For a very long time we understood that, around 13,000 years ago, people crossed over the Bering land bridge, made their way through these ice-free corridors, through the glaciers, down into North America, and then spread across both the North and South American continents. That story has now been completely confounded by various forms of new archaeological and DNA evidence.
At the Monte Verde site in Chile, Tom Dillehay has discovered evidence of inhabitation 14,500 years back. That’s a whole millennium of difference! Other archaeological and DNA evidence has pointed back to 20,000 years, and perhaps even longer, as time frames for the inhabitance of North and South America.
What we’ll be thinking about, in the years to come, is how much further back, how much longer were Native people here? How many more people were here? What were the various routes of immigration to the continent? These things are going to get much more complicated and more interesting.
DR: The people that came over the land bridge, some went to Latin America and developed very sophisticated cultures in the 1500s and 1600s—the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas. Were cultures as sophisticated developed in North America at the same time?
PD: We tend to love old cultures that build big stuff made of stone that lasts a long time and is quite monumental. Archaeologists have argued that there are six independent vectors of civilization. Two of them are in the New World, in Mexico and Peru.
But we should not ignore other societies—those who build (as my colleague Gustavo Verdesio characterizes it) in earth and clay. When we think about North America, we should always consider Cahokia [near present-day St. Louis] and the other mound-building Mississippian cultures. We should be thinking about the Chaco culture in the Southwest. All were capable of amazing kinds of technological achievements—the building of long straight roads, of monumental architecture, enabled by hierarchical social organizations.
It’s been easy to think “history” and “prehistory” and to fail to do justice to the North American continent in terms of its own long and continuous past. One of the things that’s really exciting in the field right now is the ways in which we’re trying to bridge those kinds of divides. Juliana Barr, for instance, has reminded us of the ways that Chacoan culture or Cahokia culture, robust and active in the centuries before Columbus arrived, continued to have consequences after Europeans showed up. That history ought to be continuous rather than discontinuous.
DR: In the latter part of the 1500s and the early part of the 1600s, when settlers from England were coming to Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, how many different tribes were there of Native Americans in North America?
PD: There were hundreds of tribes and tribelets, and multiple forms of social and political organization. We think about nation states, and we think about tribes, and we are tempted to consider early Native social organization as being analogous to the nation. But if we imagine instead very dense and detailed kin relations that spread across geographies, and that took the form of political entities—confederacies, chieftainships, theocracies, alliances—we can imagine a village world that is also elevated in political form into larger kinds of structures.
Today, the media commonly uses “tribal” in a pejorative way that is actually offensive to a lot of Native people, to reflect a kind of crude, instinctual political clannishness. Tribe may not be the most useful word for thinking about the ways in which Native people had organized themselves prior to Columbus. But today, the tribal nation is in fact an important and legitimate form.
DR: When European settlers are coming to North America, at that time Native Americans are not one nation. They’re different tribes or different groups. Did they have a common language? Did they fight with each other, or were they basically peaceful?
PD: Like any other place in the world, there was certainly conflict among different Native people. We mentioned slavery earlier. There are many different forms of unfreedom and enslavement across the diversity of North America.
There are interesting common languages. The Plains Indians’ sign language functioned as a kind of lingua franca. Native people developed those kinds of language systems in many places. They also had diplomats who were quite capable of speaking five, six, seven, eight languages. So the network of Native people, even across language barriers in North America and in the Americas, was quite strong.
DR: In the United States, the tradition is that the settlers in Plymouth had a Thanksgiving with the Indians, who brought some turkeys and other gifts. Is there any truth to that myth?
PD: There was apparently food-sharing back and forth. But we can stop there. First of all, we should recognize that it’s not that the Pilgrims land and they’re the first white people that Indians have ever seen. The Indian people on the Atlantic coast had been dealing with European raiders and slavers and traders for a very long time, so they knew what was happening. The Wampanoags watched them for quite a while before reaching out, and they made an alliance with the Pilgrims in order to advance their own geopolitical interests. When the Pilgrims fired off their guns for a Thanksgiving celebration, ninety Wampanoags showed up. They thought the Pilgrims were under attack and came to hold up their alliance, not to share in a feast.
In most of these Atlantic places, when Europeans come and settle, there are a few years of adjustment, and then things really do start to fall apart. We can celebrate Thanksgiving as this dream of multicultural unity, but what we have to remember is these relationships often devolved into warfare. Throughout the 1600s, basically, there’s a series of wars up and down the Atlantic coast, as Native people recognize what colonizers are coming to do, which is to take their land.
DR: Did the Native Americans say, “We’ve been on this land for thirteen thousand years or so. What are you doing here?” Or they did start trading and say, “You can stay here if you give us something”?
PD: There’s a whole range of things that happened in those encounters. Many of the land contracts, the treaties, the agreements are situations in which Native people think they’re just agreeing to share the use of the land, not actually making a legal transfer of ownership in a European sense. Most of those early agreements break down on the failure to share understandings about what exactly is being negotiated. And then those things tend to turn violent.
DR: Did the effort to get Native Americans to convert to Christianity get very far?
PD: There are many places where the Christian tradition is a useful thing for Native people. My own family is a Native Christian family of clergy.
When we think about conversion, we tend to think that people have left one system of belief and moved into another system of belief, and that’s really not how it played for most Native people. Most were—and are—happy to keep multiple systems of belief going at the same time.
For Native people, efficacy really was the bottom line in terms of spiritual practice. There’s plenty of evidence to think that Native people looked at Christians, and looked at the process of colonization, and imagined that there was some form of efficacy around Christianity. So you tend to get syncretic kinds of religious experiences.
DR: In the 1760s the French and Indian War—often called the Seven Years’ War—occurred. What was that all about?
PD: It is another instance when two European empires clash and the Native people who are allies of those two empires become central to the whole experience.
The British have a model of colonial settlement, where they bring their own colonists, and they take over land, and they expand. The French have a quite different model, which relies almost entirely upon their Native allies. When you think about the map of New France, you should imagine small groups of Frenchmen trading up and down the Great Lakes and into the Mississippi area, accompanied by Indian allies.
So you’ve got two different systems of alliance that take shape around a European struggle. When the British end up winning the global Seven Years’ War, or the French and Indian War here in North America, they have to then deal with their Native allies and with the allies of the French who remain their enemies.
DR: After the war is over, the British, to pay for their victory, started imposing taxes on the colonial settlers. That ultimately led to the Revolutionary War. What side did Native Americans take during that war?
PD: The last of the bill of complaints in the Declaration of Independence says that the king has brought on “the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” Most—but not all—Native people sided with the British. And the Americans had a bad habit of killing Indian people at random, which tended to drive away even their own allies.
DR: The Revolutionary War is won by the colonies after a number of years, and then a new government is set up under the Constitution. At the Constitutional Convention, is there any discussion of how to handle Native Americans, and what their rights might be?
PD: So many of the legal histories of the writing of the Constitution pay not much attention to Native people. Yet they appear in the commerce clause, where Congress is charged to regulate commerce between the United States and foreign nations, among the several states, and with the American Indian tribes.
They also show up in the three-fifths clause, where we’re told that the census for determining representation in Congress will take the shape of a math problem: to the “whole number of free citizens” add indentured servants. Then subtract “Indians not taxed.” Then add “three-fifths of all other persons.”
What does that mean, “Indians not taxed”? It suggests the ways in which Indians were, in fact, part of those discussions. If you can imagine an Indian not taxed, you can imagine an Indian who was taxed. That person presumably would have given up his or her citizenship in their tribal nation, and gone through a naturalization process to become an American citizen.
That tells you that Indians are put into the Constitution in order to exclude them. They’re excluded because they are seen to be political entities in and of their own right. This is why treaties end up being the most important political relationship between American Indians and the United States.
DR: What about intermarriage and relationships between the Indians and the settlers? Were there a lot of relationships that led to children who were part Indian and part European? How were they treated?
PD: This is one of these things that we see much more in New France. My family, the Deloria family, was a mixed family of French men and Indian women. What you tend to see in the British colonies, particularly among those Native people who stayed behind, is intermarriage between Native people and African-descended people.
DR: The most famous Native American in the colonial era was Pocahontas. Who was Pocahontas, and did she really exist?
PD: Pocahontas did exist. She was a much younger girl than we imagine her being. She was likely caught up in diplomatic rituals and ceremonies involving her people and her parents. She did marry an Englishman, John Rolfe, who took her back to England, where she died.
Her cultural meaning has taken on so much more weight than the actual historical personage that she was. This is because there is this thing that happens with colonizing. You can see it in the dynamic of the Revolution. The colonizers, when they land in North America, they look back over their shoulder at Great Britain and they say, “We’re not like them, we’re new people. We’re in this new land.” At the same time they look west, out at Indian country, and they say, “We’re not them either. We are civilized British people.”
So you have figures like Pocahontas, Sacagawea [who accompanied the explorers Lewis and Clark], and La Malinche [an interpreter for the conquistador Hernan Cortés], who end up being critically important Indian women who figure in the cultural mythologies that sustain these kinds of settler societies. They allow settlers to claim a kind of authenticity or connection to the land through a metaphorical marriage.
DR: In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson is president. He completes the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubles the size of the country. Did he actually get permission from anybody in the Native American community to buy that land?
PD: This is a very familiar kind of story, right? European empires navigate and negotiate their own understandings of who owns what territory, and they never think that they actually don’t own that territory at all.
This happens after the Revolution, and it certainly happens with the Louisiana Purchase. What it means is that the United States has to go out into this territory, which it now claims relative to other European nations, and figure out what’s going to happen with the Native people who are actually there, who very much own the land and are quite willing and ready to defend it.
DR: The first president of the United States who was seen as a westerner and not part of the “establishment” was Andrew Jackson. He was widely seen as being very anti-Indian, and in fact drove a lot of the Indians out of the East Coast. Is that a fair characterization of his perspective?
PD: It is. Andrew Jackson is part of a much longer trajectory of the idea of removing Indian people from the eastern part of the United States, exchanging their land, and getting them to go west of the Mississippi.
Jefferson starts thinking about this in the late eighteenth century. But Jackson is the person who brings it to fruition through the Indian Removal Act of 1830; through military campaigns to move southern Indians and also midwestern Indians from their home territories to the west of the Mississippi River; and, by clearing these massive amounts of land, allowing American settlement but also, importantly, allowing the formation of American states.
The Northwest Ordinance sets out the terms through which a colony will become a state—sixty thousand free people. What that means is if you’re a territory and you want to become a state, you need to get your Indian people out of there so that you can bring in more settlers. What that leads to is either removal—making them leave the state—or moving them onto reservation territories where they’re contained and compressed.
DR: As the U.S. is expanding under what some people would call manifest destiny, we’re moving across the continent, we’re building a transcontinental railroad, we’re looking for gold, we’re looking for new places for cattle to graze. We’re looking for new cities to build, more places where religion could be exercised the way people wanted to do it, such as the Mormons.
Very often you see this on television westerns when you’re growing up—at least when I was growing up: the nice eastern settlers are moving west and all of a sudden they’re being raided by Indians coming in with tomahawks. What was the real story?
PD: It’s pretty much the other way around. These are Indigenous people who are in their home territories, and they look up and all of a sudden they’re seeing a huge wagon train full of immigrants coming through their territory. They ride down and they say, “If you’re going to cross our land, we’re going to charge you a toll.” Of course the settlers don’t want to be charged a fee, and you get conflicts.
The story that we haven’t really told is the story of what happens in the West during the Civil War. The Civil War is such an important watershed in American history, and it leads us to think about things only in terms of the North and the South.
But if we think about what happened in the West during the Civil War—the Minnesota uprising, and the resulting military campaigns across the Dakotas; the Navajo Long Walk, in which Navajo people were basically removed from their land and marched over to New Mexico; the Bear River Massacre [in present-day Idaho], in which three hundred people were killed by militia; the Sand Creek Massacre [in Colorado Territory]—there’s so much violence that is militia-based and also state military–based that happens in the 1860s. This leads to a large number of clearances of Native people, and sets the stage for a really short burst in the 1870s and ’80s where the United States Army comes in and basically mops up the rest of the West.
DR: When I was growing up and watching TV and movie westerns, the good guys were the settlers and the U.S. Army. Did the scriptwriters not know what the reality was?
PD: I think they just thought it was a better story. It plays into a whole set of American myths, which go all the way back to the founding colonies, of the frontier wilderness, of struggle with Indians, and that struggle making Americans into Americans. These are dueling notions, but they’re all interlocked. The mythic potential of these stories is just so strong.
DR: During the 1860s, ’70s, and ’80s, a lot of treaties were entered into between the U.S. government, or states and territories, and local tribes or Indian groups. Who broke those treaties, typically?
PD: There has not been a treaty made between the United States and American Indians that has not been broken by the United States. Let’s just be up-front about that. Sure, some of these things are complicated. There are moments when it’s hard for Native people to restrain their young men, it’s hard for Americans to restrain their young men. Next thing you know, you’re in a fight and the treaty starts to fall apart.
But Americans have had a cynical view of their own treaties for a very long time. One of the things Jefferson says to William Henry Harrison goes something like this: “We can’t let the Indians think about the future in the way that we’re thinking about it. Make sure they’re living in the present, so when we negotiate a treaty it feels like it’s going to hold water, when we know that in fact over time it’s not.”
DR: Custer’s Last Stand is a very famous thing in American mythology—that [General George Armstrong] Custer was there to protect the rights of the United States, and he was slaughtered by Indians. What was the reality in the situation there?
PD: Custer just goes looking for a fight. There’s a series of fights between Lakota, Sioux people, and the American government—Red Cloud’s War—that results in the Treaty of 1868, in which Lakota territory is codified. It’s a quite extensive portion of land, and it includes the Black Hills [in the Dakota Territory]. In 1874, Custer leads an expedition into the Black Hills. They discover gold and, before you know it, there’s a huge land rush.
The army refuses to enforce the 1868 Treaty, which would have required moving white settlers out of Indian land. In January of 1876, the government says, “Any Indian who’s not at their agency is considered a hostile.” This has nothing to do with the treaty. There’s no reason why the United States should be able to make that kind of claim on Native people. That’s just the pretext for a war. The military goes out. Custer wants the glory for himself. He rides ahead and attacks the largest Indian village ever assembled on the Great Plains, to his peril.
DR: What happened at Wounded Knee?
PD: In 1877, the government wages a winter campaign, which basically breaks Lakota resistance. Sitting Bull flees to Canada, Crazy Horse is killed. Then things settle down, and people are forced onto reservations.
Native people on reservations end up becoming dependent upon the United States—the bison fail, Indians are confined, and the government has promised rations, which it used to force Native compliance. The United States is a trustee—it takes on those obligations through treaties—but it fails to uphold its end of the bargain. So Native people are starving in 1889, 1890.
They begin, on the Lakota reservations, doing a thing called the Ghost Dance. It actually comes from a prophet in Nevada named Wovoka. This is a dance of desperation. It’s not a violent dance. But the agents who were there completely lose their minds about this. “The Indians are uprising!”
These are demoralized people, not particularly dangerous—but the agents call in the military. And what you have is the largest military mobilization since the Civil War. Trainloads of troops are coming in.
There is an attempt to disarm a Lakota band that has come down from Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservation to the Pine Ridge Reservation, and it goes awry. The army opens up with these Hotchkiss mountain cannons, which are horrific, powerful weapons. It’s Custer’s Seventh Cavalry basically taking revenge for the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
DR: How many Native Americans were killed at Wounded Knee?
PD: It’s hard to know the exact number, but we think over three hundred people. People were chased for miles across the prairie. These soldiers were giving no quarter. They killed women and children as often as they could. The stories that come out of Wounded Knee are just horrific.
DR: At some point the U.S. government says, “We’re going to take the Indians who are left and give them some territory.” Did the United States actually honor some of these commitments?
PD: It’s useful to make the distinction: Was this land given them as a place to go and settle and be safe? There’s a dimension to that when we talk about removal to Indian Territory, or what’s now Oklahoma.
In most of these treaties, though, the land is retained rather than given. In other words, Native sovereignty on those reservations is continuous from before the United States until after the United States, and continues to be sovereign today. This is the reservation system. It goes all the way back to the late eighteenth century. It’s really codified in the 1850s and developed in the post–Civil War period.
DR: How many Native Americans would you say there are in the United States today?
PD: It depends on how you count, but Native Americans make up something like 1.7 percent of the American population. And it is a growing population. Native American numbers bottomed out in the 1900 census, when there were about 250,000 Native people who showed up in the census. We’re talking several millions today.
DR: What percentage of them are living on reservations, and how many reservations are there?
PD: There are 326 Indian land areas, with a range of names, that are administered as reservations. There are 574 federally recognized tribes at this point in time. But most Native people actually don’t live on reservations.
In the 1950s, the United States started policies like Termination and Relocation, which brought many Native people into cities. Native people had been moving to cities and moving around for a very long time as well. People have connections to reservation home territories, and to urban, or suburban, or small-town kinds of places. There are a lot of connective webs across that geography.
The bottom line is that Indian people’s unique political status, their self-determined management of sovereign Native lands, their resurgent demography and culture, and their control over significant natural resources means that Indian people are critical to the past and present of the United States. Native peoples make up 1.7 percent of the population, but Americans don’t often give Indians even 1.7 percent of their attention. That ought to change, and the sooner the better.