My focus on ceremonial rites and Indian belief systems was developed so as to illustrate the relationship between sacred landscapes and personal identity. Relocation not only removed the people from the land, but the land from the people and by so doing robbed these people of their identity.
As for usage, the common misunderstanding of today’s non-Indian community is that these indigenous peoples prefer to be called Native American rather than American Indian. In an informal 2005 survey conducted by Wendy Weston, Navajo, Director of American Indian Relations at the Heard Museum, of several indigenous peoples, when asked: “As a Native person, what term do you prefer to be identified by?,” most respondents preferred to be identified as American Indian and/or their specific tribal affiliation. As the respondents said, “Native” or “Native American” is a term “which anyone born in the US has the right to be called.”3 Although, as cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor reminds us, while “Indian” is an invented name that does not come from any native language, “Native American” at least distinguishes native inhabitants in the Americas from the people of India.4
As for other options, “indigenous” might be confused with an indigent state of poverty. Referring to Hopi and Zuni ancestors, this writer has trouble saying “Ancient Pueblo” in lieu of Anasazi, since the word “Pueblo” is Spanish and not Indian, and it substitutes a perfectly good Navajo word for “old enemy” and replaces it with an idea of questionable ancestry. Some words, like “Tarahumara” and “Rarámuri” are derived from the same word “Talahumali,” and are used interchangeably.
Because of these problems I have contented myself by using most words in place of each other. All of the words require qualifications, and no one term can be used in any and all occasions. Be prepared to read about indigenous peoples, Spanish terms like Navajo, or Navajo tribal terms like Diné, translations of terminology like “The People” or “Two Village People,” Natives, North American Indians, Amerinds, First Nations, Native Americans, indios, and just simply Indians. No one said it was going to be easy.
As for spelling, I have preferred to spell “Shoshone” with an “e,” not an “i” (Shoshoni), although several sources spell it “Shoshoni.” Again, I spell “Paiute” with an “a,” although some writers prefer “Piute.”
The word “settler” usually refers to whites. However, it should be remembered that often times the Indian was the settler who was confronted by unsettled invaders. This was true in the early times when Hernando Cortés and his Indian allies conquered Tenochtitlán, an Aztec city of 250,000 to 300,000 urbanites, as well as in the nineteenth century when Mormons encroached upon the Northwestern Shoshone settlers of the Cache Valley of Northern Utah.
The word “slavery” can cause consternation in some quarters. Although I use the term throughout the book, it might be more accurate to speak of “de facto slavery,” a form of bondage that whatever it is called is in fact “slavery.” The word implies the ownership of a person or persons by another or others. That ownership comes from outright purchase or exchange of goods for a person, or acquisition of another through kidnapping or violence. Synonyms include “servitude,” “bondage,” and “indenture,” while slaves were often called “servants” or “peons.” Historian Andrés Reséndez, in his book on Indian enslavement in the Americas calls this type of “de facto slavery,” which is a form of bondage and involuntary servitude, The Other Slavery.
Whatever the arrangement is called, “de facto slavery” was a form of coercion that was often accompanied by sexual and economic exploitation of the enslaved person. The brutal actions of enslaving were often an adjunct to violence in the form of warfare, rape, homicide, massacre, mutilation and removal or deportation.
In early colonial days Englishmen made war captives out of the Indians of the southeastern parts of the United States and forcibly sent them through the port of Charleston to slavery in the plantations of the West Indies. Between 1770 and 1810, Spanish soldiers escorted three thousand Apache “prisoners-of-war” to Mexico City. Women and children became domestics in central Mexico, while the Apache men were sent to work the fields and ports of Cuba. By the nineteenth century Mexican slave traders were busy kidnapping Navajo women and children to serve as domestics and laborers in the fields and homes of New Mexico. A similar situation occurred in California. Slavery or “servitude” was justified on the grounds that the uncivilized savages were having their souls saved by the actions of Christian overseers.
As for the use of the words “genocide” and “holocaust,” because of the volatility of these words I have use them sparingly. In some instances, where extermination was not the object but land acquisition was, “ethnic cleansing” may be the preferred phrase. This study follows the definitions of genocide of the Proposed Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1997) intended to supersede the United Nations Convention of 1948. Genocide, by these definitions, may be threefold: Physical (deliberate and direct or indirect killing of a specific ethnic or racial group); Biological (including sterilization and psychological conditions leading to birthrate declines and increased rates of infant mortality); and Cultural (eradication of the mores, habits, traditions, and languages of a specific group).
Obviously, under these definitions genocide has a long history in Asia and America in addition to and outside of Europe and Nazi Germany. According to James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, “Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and according to John Toland, his [Hitler’s] biographer, [Hitler] ‘often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of American extermination—by starvation and uneven combat as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies’.”5 In 1928 Hitler approvingly noted that white settlers in America had “gunned down millions of redskins” and had America in mind when he spoke of “living space” or Lebensraum in Eastern Europe.6
Genocide is a form of violence that involves killing. Battles and massacres are not necessarily genocidal events unless the battle is transformed into a massacre and the intentional killing evolves into a pattern targeting a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group. But genocide of the American Indian is part of the historical record, and as my dear friend and colleague from Fredonia State University, the late historian William T. Hagan, asserted, “Genocide is a term of awful significance, but one which has application to the story of California’s Native Americans” (and, I may add, the indigenous population of parts of the Greater Southwest in general).7
In June of 2020 the “Black Lives Matter” movement included a few marchers holding “Indigenous Lives Matter” signs. The demonstrators, in support of the Black Lives protestors, reminded the nation that while Native Americans consist of only 0.8% of the population, they experience 1.9% of police killings (data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1999 and 2011).
At the same time in St. Paul, Minnesota a statute of Christopher Columbus was brought down by protestors. Columbus, whose legacy for indigenous America was one of slavery and genocide, was removed from the public sphere. As cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor states, “Columbus and his civilization would discover no salvation in the New World. The missions, exploitations, racial vengeance, and colonization ended the praise of deliverance; the conquistadors buried the tribal healers and their stories in their blood.”8
Brendan Lindsay has noted in his book Murder State that “When one considers the actions of the press, state and federal governments, and the citizenry as a whole, the result was the creation of an inescapable system of democratically imposed genocide … devised to fulfill the demands of the newly minted citizenry of California.”9 Larissa Behrendt continued this theme by arguing that indigenous people’s claims of state-sanctioned genocide are still being defeated by legal traditions that reflect a legacy of colonialism and violence.10
Under these definitions and usages the California massacres, the Bear River Massacre, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Yaqui deportations, and the events at Wounded Knee would be described as “genocidal,” while the removal of Paiutes, Navajos, Mescaleros, Chiricahua Apaches, and Yavapai would be “ethnic cleansing.” Certain writers,