Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
The settlement of Western America was a long and harsh process in the history of the United States. During this time, settlers displaced thousands of native tribes while attempting to establish new civilizations in relatively unknown places. Although the frontiersman committed countless inhumane acts, Patrick Wolfe states in his essay that this process cannot be categorized as genocide. Instead, he makes the point that the actions performed during colonization were in fact “contests for land” and not the direct targeting for the extinction of a certain group (1).
Wolfe uses the Indian Removal Act in the early 1800s to exhibit his point. He explains that the fact that settlers first turned to removal policies shows a stress for the advancement of modernity within their nation and not a genocidal course of action. While reading this, I could not help to notice a correlation between both Wolfe’s and Willentz’s categorization of Jackson’s policies. Both sided with Jackson’s reform measures and strayed away from placing the blame of the cruel measures on the administration. Wolfe does state that the removal was “brutal” but that “it did not affect each member equally” in that many natives were able to find refuge within the United States (396). Similarly, Jacob Newton’s post on 10/30 quotes Willentz of saying Jackson was a “benevolent, if realistic paternalist” in his view of natives. Jacob goes on to refute Willentz’s description of Jackson. I agree with this claim, and in doing so, disagree with both Wolfe’s and Willentz’s account of Indian removal. Although it was probably the best option for citizens of the United States at the time as they attempted to modernize their civilization, settlers had no right to treat these people like mere objects. Although it may not be categorized as genocide in Wolfe’s dictionary, that does not take away from it as being as bad or worse than a genocidal procedure.
This essay also made me think of Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis (1893), which stated that the frontier was a defining feature of American democracy and identity and that American procedures would surely change with the closing of the frontier. When the frontier was still intact, settlers focused on the deportation of Indian tribes. But when the frontier was fully settled, “elimination turned inwards” (399). Cruel assimilation processes were put into place to make Indians’ lives harder until civil liberties were realized in the 1920s. But although the lack of a frontier changed the American processes like Turner predicted, both time frames still culminated an overall feeling of resentment and neglect for the Indian tribes in the United States.