Indian Wars Everywhere: How Colonialism Became Counterinsurgency in the US Military

Abstract

It seems as if the so-called “Indian Wars” of US continental expansion continually haunt the US military. Consider just a few examples: American soldiers in the Philippine-American War celebrated many of their commanders as “Indian fighters.” Marines in the Vietnam War regularly referred to enemy territory as “Indian Country.” And in 2011, Operation Neptune Spear resulted in the death of terrorist Osama Bin Laden, whose mission codename, “Geronimo,” referred to a famous Apache chief. In an effort to make sense of these resonances, this dissertation investigates how the violence of North American continental expansion has shaped the US military from the nineteenth century to the present. What emerges is the story of how colonialism became embedded in the US military, particularly within the realm of what is now known as counterinsurgency warfare. Counterinsurgency, as practiced by the United States, is as much about cultural attitudes towards those defined as insurgents as it is about applying a technical form of warfare, and those attitudes, I argue, have colonial roots.

Using military records, strategic manuals, battlefield reports, and literary texts, I explore how the process of continental expansion positioned Native people as “insurgents” in their own homelands, subjecting them to indiscriminate, biopolitical violence. Most critical work on counterinsurgency and the biopolitics of warfare focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, if we turn our attention to the violence that accompanied US continental expansion, colonialism emerges as a key site for the development of biopower, which manifested in what I call “euthanasia politics.” Euthanasia politics names a specific moment in the history of US colonialism when a growing imperative to manage Native life was combined with an increasingly indiscriminate approach to military violence. To these overlapping forms of state power was added the colonial nostalgia of the “vanishing Indian,” the presumption that Native people’s extinction was inevitable.

At the end of the nineteenth century the “Indian Wars” went global as the US acquired overseas territories following the Spanish-American War. Charting these transnational connections, I show how American soldiers in the Philippines imagined themselves as “Indian fighters” and instituted tactics that had been honed in the plains and deserts of the western United States. These imaginative references to the frontier would continue to define what I refer to as America’s “counterinsurgency culture,” a national mythology shaped out of a range of colonial discourses that simultaneously valorized the nation’s revolutionary origins while consistently opposing the self-determination of others. As forms of proto-counterinsurgency (and later, outright counterinsurgency) emerged as the continual subtext to US military action, the formative experience of continental expansion became embedded in the US military, the origin story of a counterinsurgency-culture. Almost every US conflict since has been, at least partially, imagined as an “Indian War.” The violence of continental expansion has left such an enduring imprint on military culture that contemporary theorists of counterinsurgency warfare study the Indian Wars for strategic insight into the ongoing War on Terror. This dissertation reflects on what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be thought of as a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.