Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas by Jeffrey Ostler (review)

That the Indigenous peoples of the Americas suffered genocide in the centuries after 1492 is widely accepted as fact within contemporary Native communities. Among non-Native scholars, however, the "question of genocide," as it has often been termed, has been much more controversial. This is particularly true within the discipline of history, owing to historians' concerns about overgeneralization and their disagreements about defining "genocide" in the first place. Undoubtedly, the debate has also been inflected by some scholars' discomfort with portraying US history too critically.

Readers of this journal may not be especially interested in a debate that many historians have themselves grown tired of, but it is necessary context for understanding Jeffrey Ostler's new book. Surviving Genocide is among the most ambitious works yet to tackle the question of genocide in US history. Ostler examines US-Native relations from before the American Revolution through the eve of the Civil War, focusing on the vast region of North America east of the Mississippi. A planned second volume will focus on the North American West. Across eleven chronologically and geographically organized chapters, Ostler advances a twofold argument captured by the book's title. First, through sustained analysis of US policy and actions toward Indigenous nations, Ostler argues that "genocide was a part of the history under consideration" (7). Second, and relatedly, he argues that Indigenous people demonstrated a "consciousness of genocide," even in contexts where genocide did not occur, and acted creatively to survive the perceived threat of destruction (147).

Ostler's expansive analysis of US-Indigenous relations casts familiar histories in a new light. After a discussion of the demographic consequences of European colonization before the mid-eighteenth century in eastern North America, part 1 examines warfare involving settlers, Natives, and imperial armies from the Seven Years' War of the 1750s and 1760s through the War of 1812. Ostler argues that imperial officials preferred to avoid the mass killing of Native people and negotiate their dependence or dispossession through trade and treaties. However, they believed genocidal campaigns were "just and lawful" when Native people proved noncompliant (94). Despite much loss, Native nations nonetheless persisted through this period through a variety of means, especially evacuation from zones of danger, intertribal confederations, and artful diplomacy. While specialists will find much familiar here, both Ostler's analysis of the perceived legality of genocidal warfare and his close attention to the demographics of Indigenous survival break new ground. For example, Ostler finds that Native populations actually increased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, illustrating the ingenuity of Native nations' varied survival strategies in the face of the existential threats of settlers-citizens and their governments. Ostler's findings regarding Native demography also illustrate the inaccuracy of non-Natives' ubiquitous statements that Indians would soon vanish.

Parts 2 and 3 of the book examine the forced migration or "removal" of Native nations from eastern North America in the early to mid-nineteenth century. These sections recast "Indian removal" as a decades-long process of which Andrew Jackson was merely one especially vocal proponent. Ostler argues that scholars have taken the statements of US officials like George Washington, Henry Knox, and Thomas Jefferson too literally when they spoke of "civilizing" and Christianizing Native people. He shows that this humanitarianism was largely performative and oriented toward internal and external audiences (including Native and European nations). Ostler argues convincingly that removal was in fact at the core of US Indian policy from the start, as "U.S. officials not only talked about removal well before 1830 [but also] took concrete steps to make it happen" (191). Compared to other recent scholarship, such as Dawn Peterson's Indians in the Family (Harvard UP, 2017), Ostler focuses less attention on the expansion of Black chattel slavery and the pressures it placed on Indian nations, especially in the South, than might be expected. This is in...