Of all the designated victim groups honored by our flourishing woke industry, we on the Old Right have generally viewed American Indians (no, I won’t use the politically correct substitute term) with the most sympathy.

Although not the first to settle in the Western Hemisphere or even in North America (Eurasians were here millennia before Mongolians crossed the Bering Strait and evolved into Amerindians), an Indian tribe resided where I live, in Southeastern Pennsylvania, many centuries ago. Susquehannock Indians were related to the Iroquois, who inhabited the northeastern part of what later became the United States. In Southern Connecticut, where I grew up, Pequannock Indians had taken up residence centuries before English settlers arrived in 1639. Today, this once-visible tribe only furnishes place names.

As a girl in Syracuse, New York, my wife learned that her city’s environs had once belonged to the Onondaga tribe, which was one of the five official Iroquois nations. Members of that tribe still live, albeit quite discontentedly, on a reservation just south of the city, and every few years, they angrily assert their proprietary claim to metropolitan Syracuse.

If those tribes located in the Northeastern United States still have descendants, it is because some of them interbred with the whites, or because they allowed themselves to be confined to reservations like the one just south of Syracuse. Most American Indians in the East were driven off their tribal land or saw it drastically reduced. The same fate awaited other Indian tribes as the European settlers and their offspring poured westward across the continent. 

There is no reason to depict the victims in this process as ecologists or pacifists. They lived in a technically primitive hunter-gatherer society, and they fought devastating wars with each other long before the white settlers (or invaders) came. The Asians who crossed the Bering Strait and became Amerindians ate everything they found as they moved south, sparing no species of animals if it appealed to them as food. And they continued this practice all the way down to Tierra del Fuego, in southern Argentina.

Some tribes also bet on the losing side in wars that were waged among the white Europeans, e.g., backing the British in the American Revolution and siding with the Confederacy in the Late Unpleasantness. These unlucky choices would allow the winners to push out those Indians who sided with their enemies. General Sherman happily turned his mayhem against rebellious tribes in the Plain States once he had finished devastating Southern secessionists. It was this inveterate Indian fighter who explained his policy toward the Plains Indians in this memorable maxim: “All who cling to their hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off.”

Perhaps the most perceptive observation about American Indians came from the French aristocratic traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in his work best known among Americans, Democracy in America, characterized the Indian as “the most philosophical of men. He has few needs and hence few desires.” Unfortunately, American Indians never developed the practical skills that would have allowed them to survive, starting with “the cultivation of the land.” Their nomadic condition and lack of settled habitations left them vulnerable to whites desiring their tribal land. Tocqueville admired the courage and love of freedom that he found among Indian tribes but was pessimistic about their survival.  

I would also make a distinction here between the woke invectives against Columbus and all Western settlements in the New World and the treatment accorded to Indian tribes in the U.S. and Canada. The attempt to diabolize the implantation of European Christian culture in Central and South America has been carried to lunatic extremes in which the statues of humanitarian clerics, like Junipero Serra, are being torn down and utterly vicious pre-Columbian Indian tribes turned into cultural giants. Recently, I watched a National Geographic Channel documentary about the conquest of Montezuma’s Aztec empire, in which we were only told in passing about the human sacrifices and torture of conquered tribes in which the Aztecs routinely engaged. The Aztec leader Montezuma was depicted as a mental giant who was unfairly taken advantage of by nasty, presumably morally inferior Europeans.

It would be fair to say that the replacement of Aztec by Latin Christian rule hardly marked the vanishing of the native population. A syncretistic culture formed in Latin American countries, where large Amerindian populations have survived and continue to have social and political influence. Most of the present inhabitants of Mexico have Aztec blood, and their country showcases its Amerindian heritage everywhere.

Most American Indians, by contrast, have endured a harsher fate, which consists of the near extinction of their tribal communities. Despite the intervention of concerned educators and some well-meaning political leaders, defeated and displaced Indians were not given a rich civilization to replace the one that their conquerors took from them. Many ended up in reservations where they languished in poverty, and down to this day, American Indians and Alaskan Natives have the lowest life expectancy in the country. The argument that these people have not adjusted well to modern society is undoubtedly true, but it’s equally the case that they’ve been stripped of their inherited culture and dignity and given very little in return. 

Being titular tribal owners of tax-free casinos doesn’t alter this situation. These enterprises are often operated by staff who look nothing like the one-time local Indians but who claim some distant Indian ancestry. This should cause no surprise. When I was in grade school in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 1950s, we looked for a member of the Pequannock tribe when our teacher proposed that we invite one to speak to our class. After an extensive search, overseen by our teacher, we uncovered one part-Pequannock in the greater Bridgeport area. This lady was well advanced in years and, because of ill health, graciously turned down our invitation. 

The present financial advantage of claiming American Indian descent may account for an otherwise puzzling fact: While in 2010 there were only 5.1 million American Indians (300 years ago, there were approximately 3.8 million in the present U.S. and Canada), by 2020 there were over 9 million. Procreation hardly explains the extent of this demographic increase. 

Like others who did not bend to Barack Obama’s “arc of history,” American Indians lost out to the forces of progress, represented first by railroads and white settlers and then by whatever else was supposed to stand for human improvement. Some of our recent “forces of progress” have moved toward the side of these displaced, early Americans, who have been incorporated into the left’s cult of victims. But here we might consider the words of the Trojan priest in Virgil’s Aeneid as he watched the Trojan Horse being dragged inside the city gates: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes” (“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”). Are we really doing the once-virile and valorous American Indians a favor by linking them to the likes of feminists and LGBT activists? I think not. It might be better to view them as an example of where Euro-Americans might be if they continue to allow others to roll over and replace them.

The Indians, of course, had an excuse for losing that we don’t. They were overwhelmed by technically more advanced enemies who came in larger and larger numbers. They certainly made every effort to defend themselves and to keep others from appropriating their tribal land. That, however, would not apply to today’s white Christian majority in the U.S. and in other formerly Western countries. We lack the Indians’ instinct for survival, however better equipped we are with modern technology. Indians didn’t lose because they allowed themselves to be invaded or because they thought their culture was inferior to that of those who eventually defeated them. We may regard them in some way as “primitive,” but they most assuredly weren’t effete or decadent.

Years ago, my brother worked as a physician on a Navajo reservation outside Phoenix, and he was always full of stories about how bleak life was for the inhabitants. They mostly died young and were usually in a state of depression exacerbated by alcohol abuse. I remember thinking to myself as I heard these accounts that what happened to the Indians is what happens when you can’t or won’t stop those who have come to replace you. You’re then at the mercy of more “progressive” enemies, who can do with you as they please. We should avoid ending up that way.