In this devastating and important account, Jeffrey Ostler brings to light the broad sweep of early US genocidal policies implemented before the more familiar period of the so-called Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century. By highlighting the preremoval period and more closely examining postremoval Native America through the Civil War, Ostler challenges us to broaden the spectrum of genocidal policy and military actions, as well as settler practices, to include dispossession and its entangled relationship with disease, demography, interethnic warfare, and cultural disintegration. As he eloquently observes, “For Native people in real historical time . . . this was the challenge before them: to avoid what they perceived as the very real possibility that their communities, their people, their nations would be totally annihilated” (7).This book is part of a larger two-volume project seeking to recalibrate Native American history between the American Revolution and Wounded Knee. Treading into recent debates and new historiographical territory around the historical reality of and accountability for “American genocide” (as Benjamin Madley has aptly phrased it), Ostler takes a nuanced approach by seeking the Indigenous voices who practiced “survivance” in the face of a rapidly expanding settler-colonial machine. While many historians have ably located Indigenous power and agency in early encounters and resistance movements, it is also critical, Ostler argues, to look again at “times and places where the balance of power did not favor Indigenous people . . . where Indians were subject to a raging sea” (8).In addition to its bold conceptual scope, Surviving Genocide is also geographically sweeping, focusing region by region on the Indigenous nations and confederacies of the present-day American South, Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, Mississippi Valley, Great Lakes, and Eastern Plains. Before tightly focusing on the period between the American Revolution and Bleeding Kansas, he offers a fascinating reassessment of earlier encounters between the Native confederacies of all of these regions, identifying the nexus of disease, starvation, and endemic warfare that proved a deadly disruption of delicate Indigenous alliances. Yet, as he argues, these alliances remained regional in scope until the 1760s. “None spread throughout the entirety of eastern North America . . . [but] the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s War set in motion events that would lead to the American Revolution” (29). This is a crucial point overlooked by historians until very recently. The power and might of an Indigenous “backcountry” exercised the enmity of the fledgling colonists while simultaneously enflaming their desire for independence. Ostler, then, directly ties American independence with genocidal dispossession right at the nation’s founding.The remainder of the book takes on the difficult task of placing the more well-known resistance movements of Pontiac, Little Turtle, and Tecumseh, among others, within the larger framework of the Removal Period. These are typically seen as parts of distinct, separated historical periods, but Ostler threads these nations and regions into one story about a clear, consistent, and merciless government policy of genocide implemented in varying degrees but always with the same outcome: Indigenous disappearance from the new Anglo-American landscape.Ostler’s neat prose powerfully conveys the clear implications of this: “By 1860, many nations—impoverished, starving, and afflicted by multiple diseases—were on a trajectory toward complete and total extinction” (244). Despite the relentless war of extermination, though, the descendants of Tecumseh and others survived. This occurred, Ostler concludes, not due to a change of heart by Americans (who continued to pursue Indian elimination into the twentieth century) but simply because of the defiant resilience of Native America.
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Mar 1, 2024
Wanda A Sigur + 1
Open Access
