Dunbar-Ortiz’s Loaded & America as a Corporate Enterprise
A Proto-Corporate Nation Founded on Slavery & Genocide
Today’s quotation comes from 2018′s “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz – an author and historian I have only just recently started reading and a woman whose work is already among the most delightful things I’ve been exposed to in the past year. In fact, I’m currently reading her previous work “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” and it is also excellent so far.
One of the historically-supported ideas central to Dunbar-Ortiz’s work (both as a whole, and when discussing the role of the gun in US history throughout “Loaded”) is the understanding of the United States not as a “discovered country” but rather as a European settler-colonial corporate enterprise; an enterprise dependent first on armed genocide, then on African slavery and ultimately, revolving around the possession of the land and cultivated resource pools throughout what we today call America.
This understanding is important because it fundamentally turns the commonly repeated historical narrative of American history on its head and although few European triumphalist observers will be keen to recognize it, this interpretation tracks seamlessly with research conducted by widely-read and highly respected authors such as Charles C Mann and Jared Diamond. Thus, rather than pristine wilderness, we now know the colonizers encountered developed landscapes (albeit, cultivated and shaped with techniques vastly different than those found in Europe) and rather than primitive, disorganized “savages,” this colonization project was advanced (through both organized war and impromptu murder) against a near-endless series of developed Indigenous nations, both small and large.
That this enterprise, undertaken by companies initially and eventually backed by the armies of powerful nations, would entail forced labor and murdering the indigenous populations of virtually every area the Europeans wanted to set up shop, was inherently understood by all who participated in the endeavor; indeed many of the early colonists sold themselves into temporary servitude (either as field workers or as soldiers) to pay for the voyage to America. Although it was not necessary to kill all indigenous people as individuals, the project of colonialism was absolutely dependent on destroying these native groups as peoples or functional nations and seizing the lands they lived on. This then allowed the colonizers to import vast numbers of enslaved Africans or (far less commonly) other pools of forced labor to cultivate the land, a model which would scale up at an incredible pace with the introduction of cotton crops, and eventually the cotton gin. Owing to the relatively small number of colonists and the difficulties of just surviving in hostile territory, let alone conducting a war, neither of these two vital requirements for the colonial project would have been possible without the technological edge provided to the Europeans by firearms. In other words, the gun began its central role in American life not as the embodiment of a right or a tool for self-defense, but as a fundamental and in some cases, legally enforced requirement – a tool to facilitate exterminating native peoples, seizing their land and controlling vast numbers of enslaved Africans to farm on it.
Finally it should be noted that the centrality of land ownership to this colonial project and the ensuing, whitewashed foundational myth of America cannot be overstated; as the author notes, land was literally life for both the various nations of Native peoples and for the invaders – first, bands of settlers and eventually colonial armies funded and controlled by the greatest powers in Europe. Thus the acquisition (by force in most cases) of land was crucial for the colonizers; it functioned as a method of profiting from colonization, as a motivation for colonists to travel across an ocean and engage in genocidal extermination of the native population and as a justification for these horrifying and inhuman actions from no less an authority than God, through his official representative on earth, the Pope.
Of course, ennobling the idea of committing crimes against humanity in the service of Jesus Christ would be necessary for political reasons in the European nations involved and to sooth the conscience of all but the greediest, most bloodthirsty colonists. Initially, this was accomplished by framing the destruction of Indigenous societies as bringing civilization and salvation through Christ to the “child-like, bestial and primitive natives” but as the power of the centralized church in Europe waned, a formulation more recognizable to modern eyes emerged. And so it was that invaders became explorers, genocide became discovery or settlement, and the gun transformed itself from a tool of bloodthirsty extermination, into a weapon of “self-defense” against the scattered remains of once proud Indigenous nations – nations now reduced to guerilla warfare and what we would today call “terrorism” in the face of naked colonial power and an enemy who respected no rules of war against non-white peoples.
– nina illingworth
