agree with this distinction. As Stannard and others have noted, most white Americans thought in terms of expulsion or extermination, and they were not necessarily mutually exclusive options. Some forced marches were literally “death marches.” The early years of the Indian Boarding School experiment might be called an attempt at “cultural genocide.”
As for “holocaust,” the word was used generally in English to denote devastation and massacres. Since 1945 most scholars, with the exception of David E. Stannard, use it to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews and others. Stannard, in his excellent and comprehensive study of the extermination of American Indians, speaks freely of an American Holocaust. Stannard’s holocaust included the interdependent forces of disease and genocide (including slavery and racism) that brought a deadly end to the lives of nineteen out of twenty Indians between 1492 and the end of the nineteenth century.11
“Holocaust” is used in “Lost Worlds” in the generic sense to refer to the massacre and devastation of American Indians by non-Indians. Whether the word(s) or phrase is “holocaust,” “genocide,” “war crimes,” or “ethnic cleansing,” all would be considered criminal actions today. These and related matters will be discussed further in the Epilogue.
As dark as these themes are, it should be remembered that the indigenous peoples survived these episodes and are active today. One aspect of that survival is the current state of Indian “fine arts,” and artist Alan Houser, among others, represents that survival instinct of the Native American. The holdings of the Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, reflect that side of the story.
Another recent change is the confirmation of Rep. Deb Haaland (Democrat/N.M.) to become secretary of the Department of Interior by President Joe Biden on March 15, 2021. The Department of Interior includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, one of the nineteen Pueblo communities in New Mexico. She is the first Native American to hold such a position. In a country in which the median income of on- and off-reservation Indians is $40,315 (between 2013–2017), compared to $66,943 for all Americans, Haaland is in a position to restore tribal sovereignty, renew reservation economies, improve conservation, and move the country’s Native Americans away from dependency to independence.12
This work, therefore, is a tribute to those few tribes that inhabit the Greater Southwest. In 2016 there were 566 federally recognized tribes in the United States. State recognized tribes amount to 130. California tribes or rancherías number 108. Arizona has 22 federally recognized Indian communities. While the total indigenous population residing on the reservations may be close to 2.9 million (with another 3 plus million off the reservation), and even though part of their land and identities has been restored, only 2% of the topography of the United States is Indian Country today. The narrative of this work is primarily focused on that time when close to 100% of the terrain of the Southwest was Indian Country (see map, Figure 0-1). The colonizer’s “holocaust” changed all of this by creating the “Lost Worlds of 1863.”
Figure 0-1 The Progression of Land Loss. Reconfiguration by Geraldine Raat of information found in Peter Nabokov’s “The Closing In” in Part Four of Native Americans: An Illustrated History (Atlanta: Turner Publishing Inc., 1993), p. 369.
(Central Rockies and Great Basin).
Surprise, Arizona
Prologue: Indigenous People in a Global Context Myth, Struggle and Survival
Every human group has a creation myth. White Americans are no exception. Their most popular origin myth concerns the frontier: Europe was crowded; North America was not. Land in Europe was claimed, owned and utilized; land in North America was available for the taking. In a migration as elemental as a law of physics, Europeans moved from crowded space to open space, where free land restored opportunity and offered a route to independence… . Thrown on their own resources, pioneers recreated the social contract from scratch, forming simple democratic communities whose political health vitalized all of America. Indians, symbolic residents of the wilderness, resisted— in a struggle sometimes noble, but always futile. At the completion of the conquest, that chapter of history was closed. The frontier ended, but the hardiness and independence of the pioneer survived in American character.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest1
At first there were few white people, and they were all going west; then, as wise old Nana knew, the lure of gold, discovered far to our west, brought them in hordes. Though most of them went on, some stayed to burrow into Mother Earth for the ore sacred to Ussen. Nana was right in thinking that gold was to bring about our extermination.
Ace Dalugie, patriarch of the Mescalero Reservation Son of Juh, Leader of the Nednhi Apache2
This is a study of relocation and removal of Indian groups in the Greater American Southwest centering on the events of the nineteenth century. Relocation, of course, is not only a nineteenth century phenomenon in American history. During World War II there were ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority, of which the largest was the Poston War Relocation Center in Yuma County (now La Paz County) in southwestern Arizona. Most of the Japanese Americans living in California, 110,000 of them, were moved to Poston and other centers, including the Gila River War Relocation Center 30 miles southeast of Phoenix. Del Webb built Poston on the Colorado River Indian Reservation over the objections of the tribal council (just as the Gila River Center, located on the Gila River Indian Reservation near Sacaton, Arizona, was built over the strong objections of that reservation’s American Indian government). It is a sad irony of western history that Indians, who themselves had been rounded up 80 or so years ago to be relocated and imprisoned on unfamiliar and hostile terrain, would now be forcibly hosting a new generation of Japanese American prisoners.3
Relocation policy was not only targeted at Japanese Americans and Indian communities, tribes, and bands, but at nuclear families and individual family heads. The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 encouraged Native Americans as individuals to leave the reservation and assimilate into the general population, i.e., urbanization of the indigenous person. The law provided for moving expenses, vocational training, four weeks of subsistence per diem, and other grants as long as the recipient went to a government designated city. By 1960 over 31,000 indigenous individuals had moved to cities. Alas, the long term effects were devastating with individuals and their families suffering from isolation, racial discrimination, and segregation. However, an unintended result was the formation of the American Indian Movement in 1968, a group that was directed by “urbanized” Indians.4 But, of course, the removal and relocation of 1863 is the concern of this work.
Obviously, to understand that year the reader should study events that occurred both before and after 1863, and that is what this study does. But there can be no denying the importance of that year. For example, 1863 was the date of the Emancipation Proclamation; when Lincoln, attempting to foster patriotism during the Civil War, declared Thanksgiving a national holiday; the beginning of the Long Walk of the Navajo; the year of the Numa (Paiute) Path of Tears; the death of Mangas Coloradas and an acceleration of the Apache wars; the Bear River Massacre of Shoshone men, women, and children; when the Comanche leader Quanah Parker became a warrior; and when precious mineral seekers encroached upon Yavapai, Mojave, Apache, and Yaqui lands. It was also when Anglo farmers near the Gila first began to appropriate water from the O’odham communities.
That year also saw the Territory of Arizona established (divided from New Mexico Territory), and the founding of the city of Prescott (gold had been discovered at Lynx Creek outside of Prescott), and the building of Fort Whipple, near Prescott. Even before the arrival of federal officials in Arizona 20 Indians had been killed outside of Fort Whipple in spite of the peace treaty that had been signed by the federal government and the Yavapai. After 1863 Arizona’s Yavapai would lose their lives, their freedom, and