THE CHOSEN AND THE DAMNED

A wide-ranging consideration of Indigenous people in a nation driven by white supremacist ideology.

Silverman, a specialist in the history of Native Americans in New England, opens with a monument proposed for Staten Island in the early 1900s that would have depicted an idealized “Indian” welcoming new arrivals to New York Harbor, just as, its pitchman said, the “Red Man gave to the White Man when our forefathers first came to these shores.” The monument went unbuilt, but the spirit underlying it lived and lives on in a white supremacism and exceptionalism that views the Indigenous people as an inconvenient obstacle to progress. Silverman draws on a recent historical movement called Settler Colonial Studies to argue that the responses to this obstacle constituted genocide in the strictest sense of the term. Moreover, the element of race and racism defined a social Darwinism that held that whites were the superior and that “Indians” (and other ethnic minorities) the inferior—and that these inferiors were destined for extinction or assimilation, which amounted to the same thing. “Indians always have been and remain central to the history of race-making in America,” Silverman urges, whether defined as savages or as unenlightened beings who simply needed to have the “Indian” erased from their cultures through prohibiting the use of Indigenous languages and the observation of traditional customs—often accomplished by kidnapping Native children for adoption by white parents, a “racial crime” one sees enacted in places such as Russian-occupied Ukraine today. Race continues to be a defining factor in a number of ways, including the fact that many tribes require a certain “blood quantum” for membership and a share of the distribution of revenues.

A charged argument for fully including Native Americans in America’s racial history.