Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire through Indian Territory

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire through Indian Territory by Paul VanDevelder

An in depth look at the driving forces and historical powers, both religious and political, behind the mentality that drove American founders to expand and perpetuate their greed for expansive land acquisitions they called, Manifest Destiny.

This book is a classic of historical revelations that needs to be read and comprehended. I loved its numerous comparisons to humanistic worldly happenings.

Excerpts:

The southerners, including President Andrew Jackson, were hearing none of it. They wanted the Indians’ land, not their trust and friendship. By 1830, southern legislatures were determined to remove Indian tribes from their midst, and they were ready to use whatever means were necessary to accomplish the task. As historian Morgan Gibson has pointed out, nineteenth-century America was a sociopolitical environment controlled by fiercely ethnocentric leaders and followers who, despite all rhetoric to the contrary, regarded all other races and peoples as subhuman.

On July 8, 1970, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in history to deliver a speech to Congress on the subjects of federal Indian policy and Native American rights. After characterizing the termination era of the Eisenhower administration as “a national disgrace,” Nixon challenged lawmakers to join him in writing a new story for Indian country. “The American Indians have been oppressed and brutalized, deprived of their ancestral lands, and denied the opportunity to control their own destiny, yet their story is one of endurance and survival, of adaptation and creativity in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 prompted an abrupt and dramatic return to the nihilistic paternalism of the past. The cause for that turnabout was neatly summarized in an article published in Forbes magazine that observed, with searing, atonal irony, “Now, at a time when the United States seems to be running out of practically everything, Indian reservations constitute one of the least-known repositories of natural resources on the continent.”

a secret committee made up of industry experts and their counterparts in conservative think tanks, such as the Rand and Heritage foundations, called the Strategic Minerals Consortium. The SMC was charged with the task of studying the problem of mineral scarcity and finding a way to gain easy access to mineral treasures in Indian country, Secretary of the Interior James Watt came up with a plan of his own, one that was eerily reminiscent of the strategy devised by Congresswoman Beck, Senator Watkins, and Commissioner Myer thirty years earlier. Watt proposed that Congress use its plenary power over the tribes to declare all treaties null and void. Then, the Indians should be moved off their reservations and into closer proximity to white citizens, in urban centers, where they could be more easily assimilated into mainstream society.

By 1983, however, most tribes had stepped into the modern era. By then, thanks to the Indian Education Act passed by Congress a decade earlier, thousands of young Indians had been trained as chemists, biologists, and lawyers in the white man’s colleges and universities. Rather than disappearing into urban America after graduation, many returned to their reservations with the intent of protecting their natural resources, their treaties, and their tribal sovereignty.