19552 GW Mag 26_Final_singles - Flipbook - Page 25
“Native people have been foundational
to the racial identities that came into
being in the United States.”
— DAVID J. SILVERMAN, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
In The Chosen and the Damned, History Professor David J.
Silverman explores the evolution of racial identities among
European settlers and Native Americans.
for the paramount role of race in America, Native people
were nowhere to be seen,” he said. “It struck me that this was
a deeply distorting approach. And it needed a correction.”
In some ways, The Chosen and the Damned is an effort to
set the racial record straight. Silverman starts his story before
the founding of the American nation—before the “white”
and “Indian” identities took shape. Prior to the 18th century,
Europeans defined themselves primarily through religion, not
skin color. Elite classes even believed Native people should
be converted—“civilized”—into Christian faith and “become
absorbed by the superior civilization,” Silverman noted.
But white Americans on the frontier—which initially barely
reached past Boston and later stretched west—viewed Native
people as savages incapable of change. “They routinely
advocated simply wiping these people off the face of the
Earth and taking their land,” Silverman said.
At the same time, Native Americans increasingly adopted
Christianity—blurring the religious dividing line between
“civilized” European and “savage” Native people. “By the
time you get 100 years into colonialism, Christianity just
won’t suffice anymore to distinguish Europeans from
everyone else,” Silverman said. Instead, Euro-Americans
turned to an emerging identity of whiteness which embodied superiority and justified expansion.
Meanwhile Native people forged their own new identity—
largely in response to colonial aggression. As early as the
17th century, a series of Indigenous prophets started preaching
a common message: The Great Spirit, a concept borrowed
from Christianity, created Indians and
whites to live separately. “They essentially
said, ‘We have a lot more in common with
each other than we do with those people,’”
Silverman explained. If the white man’s
intent was to eliminate Indigenous people,
the prophets maintained, “they needed to
band together—or be doomed.”
The 1820s sandstone relief “Daniel Boone and
the Indians,” located in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda,
presents a problematic representation of
“savage” Native Americans versus “heroic”
European colonizers.
Founding Failures
Silverman traces that racial evolution through some of
the most significant moments in early American history.
The Declaration of Independence itself includes a climactic
grievance accusing King George III of unleashing “merciless
Indian savages” on the fledgling nation’s frontier. Even under
its first president, young America’s military campaigns were
focused on conquering Native territory. “George Washington’s
administration spent five-sixths of its operating budget fighting
Indian wars,” Silverman said.
And the tragic Indian Removal campaign of the 1830s,
a brutal episode of forced migration that resulted in over
10,000 Native American deaths, was spurred by a white
frontier society determined to eliminate Native people—by
law or by violence. “It is a direct result of white supremacist,
anti-Indian racism that devalues Native life,” Silverman said.
Still, Silverman said this history is ultimately a story of
resilience. The new Indian identity galvanized multi-tribal
resistance movements and led to 20th-century civil rights
victories. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S.
government forced tens of thousands of Native American
children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools intended
to destroy tribal identities. Instead, they produced new
generations of Native leaders who embraced a shared
identity. the schools furnished them with a formal education
and a common language that led them to band together in
national Indian organizations and fight collectively for their
rights, Silverman said.
Throughout the 20th century, Native activists and
institutions used that unity to advocate for greater autonomy
and challenge federal policies. They successfully pushed
presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama and Joe
Biden to recognize that Native nations should exercise
more and more self-government.
“It’s a remarkable achievement,” Silverman said. “You
don’t get that without a common Indian identity.”
GW Arts & Sciences | RESEARCH & LEARNING | 25
