Violent representations: hostile Indians and civilized wars in nineteenth-century USA

Abstract

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, white settlers officially labelled most conflicts with Native Americans as ‘wars’, unlike the ‘massacres’ white settlers experienced. This differential description indicated each race's respective ‘civility’ and ‘savagery’. Indiscriminate warfare was officially attributed solely to Indians, despite much contrary evidence. State bodies' recognition of conflicts as ‘wars’ was also necessary for the remuneration of the militia, who exercised much of this organized violence. While historians have ascribed this differential representation of the violence to consensual white cultural chauvinism, I emphasize that it was contested from within the settler community, and needed to be continuously maintained. A comparison of an 1864 Colorado conflict to an 1860 California one demonstrates how local coalitions dominated by landowners and politicians usually managed to officially designate the militia's violence as civilized ‘wars’ against ‘hostile Indians’. In the exceptional Colorado case, federal intervention disrupted this pattern.

Keywords:

• settler colonialism
• indigenous peoples
• racial conflict
• violence
• white racial ideology
• common sense

Acknowledgements

I thank the staff at the California State Archives, Sacramento, for their help with locating documents. This paper has benefitted from comments by JoEllen Anderson, Hana Brown, Yasmeen Daifallah, Niel Fligstein, Dafna Hirsch, Jimmy Johnson, Roi Livne, Sarah Anne Minkin, Tianna Paschel, Silvia Pasquetti, Chaim Pessah, Denise Pessah, Dylan Riley, Sandra Smith, Iddo Tavory, Cihan Tugal, Loic Wacquant, Nicholas H. Wilson and three anonymous reviewers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Pessah

TOM PESSAH is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.