I recently finished watching a documentary by Stephen Ives and Ken Burns entitled The West. I highly recommend seeing it if you’d like to gain some insight into the realties regarding the conquest of the west.

A History Of Conquest In Which The Conquerors Portray Themselves as the Victims

For many in the Eastern United States during the late 1880’s, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was considered an accurate representation of what life in the west was, and had been, like. During the performance Native Peoples attacked a stagecoach and homesteaders only to be defeated by Whites. Sitting Bull, the Lakota chief who had fought the United States in an attempt to save the lands of his people, even appeared in the show for a brief time. Ironically, the climax of the performance was a highly inaccurate reenactment of the 1876 battle of The Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) in which he had fought. [1]

The truly telling aspect of William Cody’s show was that despite the fact that Whites had been the aggressors and conquerors in the west, they always appeared as the victims of attacks in the show – and in much of the literature of the time as well. Native Peoples were demonized while White colonialists were seen as stalwart adventurers, guiltless of everything save ambition and hard work. It represented a very common belief in American society – that Whites had been victimized by what many considered ‘savage’ peoples while innocently attempting to carve out peaceful existences against all odds. This version of history has largely permeated the American psyche, one that would be reflected over the years in US policies.

Despite the fact that Chinese immigrants had played a quintessential role in building the railroad that ultimately connected east and west, a device that helped solidify US continental control, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first significant restriction of free immigration in US history. White workers, who blamed the Chinese for growing unemployment in the west, were responsible for beginning what would not be properly ratified for decades. The act rendered all Chinese immigrants permanent aliens, excluding them from US citizenship, which the 1924 Immigration Act would later extend to include other Asian peoples.

The history of North America is a litany of racism, conquest, and deceit. Those native to the continent were, in all areas, reduced to third class citizens in a land that they had inhabited since before recorded history. For Europeans in the new world, subjugation and mass murder were calling cards. And yet, like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, we remember them now not as genocidal or oppressive, but as stalwart heroes.

History is strange in that the powerful often, and for centuries, champion false and corrupted versions. Nowhere is that practice better exemplified than in North America.

My own personal family history is steeped in the conquest of a different land - of India, where my father was born and raised until the age of nine. My father’s family fought to help subdue India and lived there for a considerable amount of time. So long, in fact, than many of my relatives, though English, had no idea what England was like. To this day some of them still display the sorts of despicable traits that one might expect of those that spent a considerable period of time looking down their noses at those that they viewed as inferior.

It’s not uncommon to come across vignettes on Canadian television exalting, for example, the fortitude and determination of those that carved out existences on the Canadian prairies (my mother’s family among them), or that many died in the attempt. On the other hand, what is rarely addressed is the fact that that land had once been home to a people that had inhabited it for thousands of years. There is, of course, little mention of them in such vignettes, or the fact that we took this land from them.

An immense denial of factual history is deeply rooted in the North American psyche. It has, in no small way, solidified our belief in our own superiority, despite the fact that our calling card is one that exalts the noblest of virtues - equality, justice, and liberty. Like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, we have yet to stop viewing ourselves as victims, as those that are rarely, if ever, in the wrong. Nothing better demonstrates this than the current wars against terror and Iraq. As if no part was played in the production of either self-proclaimed “evils”, we dumb giants step the earth looking to defeat that which terrifies us the most - the truth of ourselves and our past actions.

[1] Sitting Bull did not participate in the reenactment of what was called “Custer’s Last Stand�. His involvement with the show merely consisted of his riding a horse around the performance area once during each show.