Loaded. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
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enshrined these obligations as constitutional law: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The continuing significance of that “freedom” specified in the Bill of Rights reveals the settler-colonialist cultural roots of the United States that appear even in the present as a sacred right. Several of the colonies that declared independence in 1776—Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Virginia—had already adopted individual gun-rights measures into their state constitutions before the Second Amendment was passed at the federal level.
Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations. With the expansion of plantation agriculture, by the late 1600s they were also used as “slave patrols,” forming the basis of the U.S. police culture after enslaving people was illegalized. That is the inseparable other half of the settler-colonial reality that is implicit in the Second Amendment. The first enslaved Africans to be shipped to Britain’s first colony of the eventual thirteen colonies that became the United States took place in 1619, when twenty bonded Africans arrived in Virginia. Most of the labor being used in the first decade of the colony was made up of British and other Europeans who had indentured themselves for varying lengths of time, but African slavery was different. As Howard Zinn points out, “Some historians think those first blacks in Virginia were considered as servants, like the white indentured servants brought from Europe. But the strong probability is that, even if they were listed as ‘servants’ (a more familiar category to the English), they were viewed as being different from white servants, were treated differently, and in fact were slaves.”5
Other scholars have presumed that the British settlers in North America were reluctant to enslave Africans, but that too seems a spurious notion. When the Doctrine of Discovery promulgated by the Vatican in the mid-fifteenth century “legalized” the Portuguese capture and enslavement of the people of West Africa, the trans-Atlantic slave trade took off, first within European markets. Then, in 1492, it reached the Caribbean and had been in effect for over a century when the Virginia seaboard was wrenched from the Indigenous farmers by English usurpers. From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law promulgated by Christian European monarchies to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa for enslaving those who lived there. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine.6
This doctrine, on which all European states relied, thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize, enslave, and exterminate foreign peoples, and these were later embraced by other European monarchical colonizing projects, such as the British in North America.
The only barrier to introducing slavery in Virginia and all the other colonies would have been economic, not ethical. The Southern colonies emerged in territory that had been one of seven original birthplaces of agriculture7 in the world tens of thousands of years before, developed by the Muskogee and other Indigenous agricultural societies. Appropriated by European settlers, these lands would become economies based on enslaved African labor and increasingly on breeding enslaved people for profit, with the Indigenous farmers forced to the peripheries. At the time of U.S. independence, half the population of South Carolina was made up of enslaved Africans, with the other agribusiness colonies having large enslaved populations as well. By the late seventeenth century, onerous slave codes had been developed, which included mandatory slave patrols drawn from the already existing militias.
The wealthy slavers of the Southern colonies, particularly those in Virginia, were most incensed by the British Proclamation following the French and Indian War prohibiting expansion over the Appalachian ridge, since their wealth relied on accessing more and more land as they depleted the soils with intensive monocrop production for the market. They defied the Proclamation, taking survey teams into the Ohio country to map the territory for future settlement, which by definition meant the extension and expansion of slavery. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, George Washington was already a notoriously successful slaver and land speculator in unceded Indian lands.8
Washington and the other founders of the United States designed a governmental and economic structure to serve the private property interests of each and all of the primary actors, nearly all of them slavers and land speculators, with the brilliant Alexander Hamilton as the genius of finance. Like the Indian-killing militias that continued and intensified as the United States appropriated more land for slavers, slave patrols grew accordingly. The ethnic cleansing of Native Americans complete, slavers—with their reserve of capital and enslaved labor—transformed the Mississippi Valley into the Cotton Kingdom that formed the basis for U.S. capitalism and world trade. In the words of Harvard historian Walter Johnson, “The extension of slavery into the Mississippi Valley gave an institution that was in decline at the end of the eighteenth century new life in the nineteenth. In 1800, there were around 100,000 slaves living within the boundaries of the present-day states of Mississippi and Louisiana; in 1840, there were more than 250,000; in 1860, more than 750,000”9
The militaristic-capitalist powerhouse that the United States became by 1840 derived from real estate (which included enslaved Africans, as well as appropriated land). The United States was founded as a capitalist state and an empire on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves, hence the term chattel slavery; this was exceptional in the world and has remained exceptional. The capitalist firearms industry was among the first successful modern corporations. Gun proliferation and gun violence today are among its legacies.
TWO
SAVAGE WAR
So, if ever built, what will the United States Native American Genocide Memorial Museum contain: What will it exhibit?
It will be one room, a fifty-foot square with the same large photo filling the walls, ceiling, and floor.
There will only be one visitor allowed at any one time.
There will be no furniture.
That one visitor will have to stand or sit on the floor.
Or lie on the floor if they feel the need.
That visitor must remain in that room for one hour.
There will be no music
The only soundtrack will be random gunshots from rifles used throughout American history.
Reverberation.
What will that one photo be?
It will be an Indian baby, shredded by a Gatling gun, lying dead and bloody in the snow.
Sherman Alexie, from You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me1
The violence of settler colonialism stems from the use of “savage war” and is related to the militias of the Second Amendment. “Savage war”—also called petite guerre in military annals, and Anglo-America’s “first way of war” by military historian John Grenier—dates to the British colonial period and is described as a combination of “unlimited war and irregular war,” and a military tradition “that accepted, legitimized, and encouraged attacks upon and the destruction of noncombatants, villages and agricultural resources . . . in shockingly violent campaigns to achieve their goals of conquest.”2
When compared to other countries