Trick or Treaty?

This is a transcript from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be slight differences in wording and content.

ED: Peter, that’s a very powerful story about the 17th century. We know, however, the story didn’t end there, that even if the Pequots learned savagery from them, the battles of white Americans and American Indians took place across a vast continent and for centuries. So we know that this lesson, whatever it was, had to be learned over and over again. And somehow, a commonality across all that period of time and across all that space was the treaty, the opposite of slaughter and massacre.

How did we reconcile the story that we just heard with a larger story of American Indian relations with the United States?

PETER: Well, Ed, Caroline rightly emphasizes misunderstanding across cultural boundaries. What happens over the long term is evolving understandings, ways of coexisting. On the one hand, there’s a simple brute fact of the balance of power, that is can Indians effectively retaliate well? In King Phillip’s War, they retaliate.

But the second thing in addition to recognizing the capacity or power of indigenous people is a recognition of them as people. And the treaty, which is much derided in American history in American Indian law

BRIAN: Much violated.

PETER: What are treaties after all? Treaties are just a scam, a fig leaf over the acquisition of conquest of an entire continent. I think we tend to overstate that in a sense of collective guilt about taking the land. But those treaties have consequences. And you can see it in the courts today in the disposition of cases on Indian claims, in recognitions of Indian sovereignty.

All that is the legacy of all the treaties that were made. That’s a legacy of, in fact, the way wars were conducted over the long course of American Indian history. That doesn’t mean that they were good wars. It doesn’t mean they were fought well or decently. But it does mean that you saw the enemy, that is, if you’re the Americans or the English before them, you saw the enemy as worthy of treating with.

Start off with the English settlers thinking that they are civilized, they are Christian, and they’re facing savages in the wilderness. Making war and then ended war, making peace, is a civilizing process on both sides. It’s the way that you resolve conflicts that establish precedents that, in their accumulative force, lead to something we might recognize as civilization.

BRIAN: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, what do you do when the current rules of war restrict your tactics? Easy– change the rules.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory, and we’ll be back in a minute.