Pillage and Genocide: A Broad Picture of American History

One of the points Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz  makes in "An Indigenous People's History of the United States" is that without the indigenous, the North American continent could not have been habitable. The first indigenous settlers made slow gains in domesticating the continent when humans first arrived over the Bering Strait land bridge 12,000 years ago. This demonstration included locating water sources, carving paths, facilitating migration and trade, clearing thick forest, and burning undergrowth, all which the Europeans took for granted when they first arrived to undermine the "ungodly savages", whom they basically stole an entire infrastructure from, rendering 10,000 years at toiling the land meaningless. No gratitude was ever mentioned either; all we repaid them with was a devilish genocide, which wasn't even a word until the 1940s. How could these foolish Calvinists live with themselves? We are still dealing with their backwards logic to this day, as we still invade countries under the false bravado of saving them, aggravating the indigenous all across the world.

She's also correct that we have an inflated conception of our constitution that kind of serves to replace a mythological origin story. The founding fathers are deemed holy saviors whose brilliances are unparalleled. We can't shake the amendments that are no longer functional in modern times- specifically the right to bear arms- because it violates the mythology of our founding. We revolutionized the nation-state by becoming the first nation founded by laws. But even law is not perfect when it becomes over-idealized, since we end up living in the past when we cling to it too much. For instance, there was no law against genocide in our infant centuries, so we don't have to take any accountability for violating an international one that is current. You won't find anything about genocide in our Constitution, but you probably would if a new one were to be drawn up. The genocide of the indigenous who made it so easy for Europeans to colonize the Americas is hardly no different from any other campaign, though not quite as brutal as the Nazi concentration camps or the Russian progroms. Indeed, this brutality is what gave an opportunity for the word to become common, but that is a moot point. Genocide is genocide, no matter what historical period it is.