US origin myths

          by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Ortiz is Professor of Ethnic and Women's Studies at California State University, Hayward.
She is the author of Red Dirt: Growing up Okie; Roots of Resistance: Land; Tenure in New Mexico,
The Great Sioux Nation and Indians of the Americas.

US ORIGIN MYTH based on white supremacy is born (April 1997)
 White supremacy is inseparable from the US origin story and the notion of patriotism in the US today.
It was Andrew Jackson who carried out the final solution against the indigenous people of the north American continent. It was during the 1820s, the Jackson era, that the unique white supremacist origin myth of the US was created. James F Cooper's re-invention of America in The Last of the Mohicans has become our official origin story. Herman Melville called Cooper ';our national novelist,' and of course he was the great hero of Walt Whitman who sang the song of the American super-race through empire. The origin myth has the frontier settlers replacing the native peoples, similar to the Afrikaner origin myth in South Africa.
In the end, only the Old Anglo Settlers are true Americans--all others are guests in good times and intruders and scapegoats in bad times.

Reconciling empire and liberty is an historic obsession of American political thinkers and historians. Thomas Jefferson had hailed America as an 'empire for liberty.' Andrew Jackson coined the phrase, 'extending the area of freedom' to describe the annexation of Texas, and the term, 'freedom,' itself became a euphemism for continental and world wide expansion.

 13 November 2004

The US left, historically and at the present, denies and rationalises the facts of the founding in order to continue the myth that the US is a benign democracy, viewing obvious contradictions as anomalies. The left refuses to recognise that the overseas imperialism that became evident in the 1898 war with Spain was only a further manifestation of the continental imperialism against the nations and peoples now known as Native Americans begun with this country’s founding, soon followed by the annexation of half of Mexico.

We on the US left are stuck. We are stuck in a false past, and therefore are confused by the present. We can’t move forward. We tell others and ourselves lies, often claiming that it is necessary in order to “win” people over. There is a “left” and a “right” interpretation of the lie of US origins. No social or political vision, realistic or otherwise, no ordering of priorities can be conjured until we realise that this is serious business, this lie, and no good can come of it.

The majority of the US voting population is white and descendant of the old settler class, both the wealthy white, Anglo-Saxon protestants such as the Bush family, and the more numerous Scots-Irish “frontier” settlers—foot soldiers of the US empire—who comprise the majority of the southern states’ populations. I was born of and raised in the latter group in rural Oklahoma.

Comparing the Gulf wars with the Indian wars
Let’s take the first and second Gulf wars. Most of my left comrades named and names oil as the objective. I argue that these are “Indian wars”, a renewal of the birth of the nation by imperialism and genocide. The Second Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR) is a self-contained elite army unit that most know as having been at the head of Patton’s Third Army when it crossed Europe during the Second World War.

In the first Gulf war, at that farcical stage called “the ground war”, the Second ACR led the tanks into Iraq. A retired commander of the ACR proudly told his TV interviewer that the unit was formed in the 1830s to fight the Seminoles and was responsible for finally defeating them in the Florida Everglades in 1836, in the third US war against the Seminoles over nearly two decades.

The first two wars were led by General Andrew Jackson, the third was under Jackson as commander in chief, elected president largely due to his role in those wars. Soon after, the five largest Native nations of the Southeast were forcibly expelled and driven to Indian territory or Oklahoma. Again in the second Gulf war, the Second ACR led the invasion of Iraq, this time, while waiting orders on the Kuwait border, painting themselves and doing “Indian dances” and “war whoops”, as observed by an Associated Press reporter.