Indian Wars Everywhere: How Colonialism Became Counterinsurgency in the US Military by Stefan Aune A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (American Culture) in the University of Michigan 2019 Doctoral Committee: Professor Philip Deloria, Co-Chair, Harvard University Professor Gregory Dowd, Co-Chair Professor Kristin Hass Professor Penny Von Eschen, University of Virginia Stefan B. Aune [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1775-0436 © Stefan B. Aune 2019 This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Mark and Janis Aune. ii Acknowledgements I could not have completed this dissertation without the support of mentors, colleagues, family, and friends. My dissertation committee guided this project from start to finish with unwavering intellectual generosity. Phil Deloria helped me turn a tenuous idea into a fully-formed dissertation. He read every word, offered invaluable feedback, wrote letters, provided me with professional guidance, and most importantly brought a genuine enthusiasm and friendship to his advising that I am incredibly grateful for. Phil consistently identified what was most interesting in my writing and helped me bring that to the forefront, and this project would not exist without him. Greg Dowd has been a model of academic mentoring I hope to emulate, and his thoughtful revisions made this a stronger dissertation. Conversations with Penny Von Eschen broadened the scope of my research and revealed avenues of inquiry I would not have found on my own. Kristin Hass has been a source of intellectual and professional support from the moment I was accepted into the Department of American Culture, and I am thankful she was there to help me bring this chapter to a close. This project took shape in classes taught by Anthony Mora, Susan Najita, Maria Cotera, Magda Zaborowska, Tiya Miles, Penny Von Eschen, Matt Lassiter, Greg Dowd, Scott Lyons, and Kristin Hass. Marlene Moore, along with the rest of the staff and faculty in American Culture, has been an endless source of support and institutional expertise, without whom none of this would even function. I am also grateful for the mentoring I received at Macalester College, particularly from Andrea Cremer, Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Lynn Hudson, Peter Rachleff, Kiarina Kordela, and Duchess Harris. This project was supported by generous fellowships and grants from the Rackham Graduate School, the Department of American Culture, and the Bruce and Ileane Thal Fellowship. I am thankful for the assistance from librarians and staff at the Clements Library, the University of Michigan Special Collections, the Hatcher Graduate Library, the National Archives in Washington D.C., the United States Military Academy Special Collections, the Newberry Library, the Carroll University Library, the Library of Congress, and the Chester Fritz Library at the University of North Dakota. I am grateful for the feedback I received at the American Studies Association Annual Conference, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Annual Conference, the Western History Association Annual Conference, the Nordic American Studies Association Biennial Conference, the Confronting the Violence(s) of History Conference at Rutgers University, and the Disentangling Empire Conference at the University of Michigan. I want to offer a special thank-you to my PhD cohort: Joo Young Lee, Iván Chaar-López, Stephen Molldrem, Sophie Cooper, and Rachel Miller. Rachel —looking forward to hiking Cascade Canyon with you sooner rather than later. iii Thanks to Mom, Dad, Ingrid, and the rest of my family for the love and support. You have always encouraged me to read, learn, and think independently, and you laid an intellectual foundation for this dissertation. I am grateful for the many opportunities you have provided for me over the years. I also want to thank my grandmother Elaine Aune, and remember my grandparents Harry Aune, Eldon Blomgren, and Helen Blomgren. Finally, to Leigh York: thank you for the love and friendship without which I could not have spent the last seven years working on this project. If I had to do it all over again, I would not hesitate to drive back and forth between Ann Arbor and Ithaca over and over and over and over. You are a constant reminder of what really matters. iv Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract vi Introduction. Geronimo EKIA 1 Chapter 1. Euthanasia Politics and the Indian-Fighting Army 29 Chapter 2. Beyond Total War: Settler-Colonialism and Military 86 Strategy on the Southern Plains, 1868-1870 Chapter 3. “Indian Fighters” in the Philippines: Imperial Culture 143 and Military Violence in the Philippine-American War Chapter 4. Narrating Empire in Global Indian Country 185 Chapter 5. America’s Counterinsurgency-Culture and the War on Terror 217 Conclusion. Counterinsurgency and Standing Rock 273 Bibliography 285 v Abstract It seems as if the so-called “Indian Wars” of US continental expansion continually haunt the US military. Consider just a few examples: American soldiers in the Philippine-American War celebrated many of their commanders as “Indian fighters.” Marines in the Vietnam War regularly referred to enemy territory as “Indian Country.” And in 2011, Operation Neptune Spear resulted in the death of terrorist Osama Bin Laden, whose mission codename, “Geronimo,” referred to a famous Apache chief. In an effort to make sense of these resonances, this dissertation investigates how the violence of North American continental expansion has shaped the US military from the nineteenth century to the present. What emerges is the story of how colonialism became embedded in the US military, particularly within the realm of what is now known as counterinsurgency warfare. Counterinsurgency, as practiced by the United States, is as much about cultural attitudes towards those defined as insurgents as it is about applying a technical form of warfare, and those attitudes, I argue, have colonial roots. Using military records, strategic manuals, battlefield reports, and literary texts, I explore how the process of continental expansion positioned Native people as “insurgents” in their own homelands, subjecting them to indiscriminate, biopolitical violence. Most critical work on counterinsurgency and the biopolitics of warfare focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, if we turn our attention to the violence that accompanied US continental expansion, colonialism emerges as a key site for the development of biopower, which manifested in what I call “euthanasia politics.” Euthanasia politics names a specific moment in the history of US colonialism when a growing imperative to manage Native life was combined with an increasingly indiscriminate approach to military violence. To these overlapping forms of state power was added the colonial nostalgia of the “vanishing Indian,” the presumption that Native people’s extinction was inevitable. At the end of the nineteenth century the “Indian Wars” went global as the US acquired overseas territories following the Spanish-American War. Charting these transnational connections, I show how American soldiers in the Philippines imagined themselves as “Indian fighters” and instituted tactics that had been honed in the plains and deserts of the western United States. These imaginative references to the frontier would continue to define what I refer to as America’s “counterinsurgency culture,” a national mythology shaped out of a range of colonial discourses that simultaneously valorized the nation’s revolutionary origins while consistently opposing the self-determination of others. As forms of proto-counterinsurgency (and later, outright counterinsurgency) emerged as the continual subtext to US military action, the formative experience of continental expansion became embedded in the US military, the origin story of a counterinsurgency-culture. Almost every US conflict since has been, at least partially, imagined as an “Indian War.” The violence of continental expansion has left such an enduring imprint on military culture that contemporary theorists of counterinsurgency warfare study the Indian Wars for strategic insight into the ongoing War on Terror. This dissertation reflects on what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be thought of as a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare. vi Introduction: Geronimo EKIA On May 2nd, 2011, President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and other members of the United States national security team sat in the White House situation room. In tense silence they listened as CIA director Leon Panetta narrated the unfolding of Operation Neptune Spear, a mission targeted at long sought after Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. When the Special Forces operatives reached the target, Panetta reported that “we have a visual on Geronimo,” and after a few minutes he proclaimed “Geronimo EKIA.” Geronimo, the name given to Chiricahua Apache leader Goyahkla by his Mexican enemies, was code for Bin Laden, and the coded message that reported a successful mission was “Geronimo – EKIA,” or “enemy killed in action,” drawing a comparison that Fort Sill Apache Tribe chairman Jeff Houser would later call “painful and offensive.”1 The ensuing debate over the code-name controversy, which was taken up in newspapers, blogs, and the Senate committee on Indian Affairs, pointed to the enduring legacy of the so-called “Indian Wars,” those conflicts fought in the continental United States primarily in the second half of the nineteenth century. Geronimo has been held up as one of the most intractable, elusive, and dogged resisters of US continental expansion, the last famous Native leader to surrender. He has been variously represented as incurably savage, impossibly elusive, and unwaveringly cruel. In short, Goyahkla the person has been replaced by a representation, “Geronimo,” which has been appropriated to serve a variety of interests. As Richard King notes, “Goyahkla may have been captured in 1886, but images of him have always 1Karl Jacoby, “Operation Geronimo Dishonors the Indian Leader,” Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/10/opinion/la-oe-jacoby-geronimo-20110510.