Just whose country is it anyway?

On Dec. 19, 2023, in an interview on a cable TV station that reaches nearly 2 million viewers each weeknight, a former senior advisor in the Trump White House spoke about what he characterized as the “complete resettlement of America.” He attributed that phenomenon to the arrival here of millions of people from far and wide, bringing with them their cultures, traditions, and belief systems. Those immigrants, he asserted, were radically transforming and well on the way to obliterating the cultures of all the people who settled here before them — changes that he warned would prove to be permanent.

That speaker was Stephen Miller, who is said to have been the primary architect of the 45th president’s draconian immigration policies. Miller appeared to be oblivious to (or chose to ignore) the fact that the events he recounted on the Jesse Watters Show — which he delivered in a veritable tirade — described precisely what happened to American Indians after white Europeans came to what is now the continental U.S. With rare exceptions, those men and the many white men who followed them viewed the indigenous people as savages.

Convinced of their superiority, those men displaced millions of Native Americans by force, destroyed or confiscated their property, and killed untold numbers of men, women, and children, directly with guns and forced marches of hundreds of miles. They indirectly killed them by infecting them with smallpox, measles, and other diseases to which the indigenous people had never before been exposed and against which they had no immunity.  

Archeologists, population demographers, and other experts believe that in 1492 there were at least twice as many Indian nations as the 574 that the Bureau of Indian Affairs recognizes today, with a total population of at least 10 million and possibly many times that number.

So upwards of 574 tribal nations — and millions of human beings — were wiped out. Documenting “the near extermination, and in some cases, the total extermination of native tribes and cultures” is the mission of the American Indian Holocaust Museum, in Houston, Texas, and the Holocaust Museum that is part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Miller, however, was not speaking about American Indians, people whose ancestors had crossed into North America thousands of years ago via the land bridge that then connected that continent with Asia. He was ranting about the immigrants who have made the U.S. their home in recent years and the thousands of migrants eager to settle here to escape poverty, persecution, and despotic governments in their native lands.

Miller spoke as if immigration to the U.S. is a totally new phenomenon. He seemed determined to expunge from our memories our knowledge of the millions of people of every race and ethnicity who have come here from overseas since before our founding as a nation — including Miller’s maternal great-grandfather, who arrived in the U.S. in 1903, bringing with him the culture, religion, and traditions of the Jewish community in the Eastern European town where he grew up — and with no knowledge of English. The same is true of all the white supremacists that share Miller’s views. Every single one of those people is descended from immigrants.

Miller also seemed to be insinuating that in some supernatural fashion, new immigrants and those hoping to be admitted into the country possess the power to destroy the cultures and traditions of everyone already living here. Needless to say, he did not explain why that had never before happened on American soil — except to Native Americans.

It never ceases to astonish me that when Miller and other white supremacists speak of “real” or “true” Americans, they never mention the people who populated the continental U.S. long before any white man came: the millions of descendants of the Paleo-Indians, who developed distinct, highly diverse, creative cultures.

According to the University of Houston’s Digital History website, “All Indians lived in organized societies with political structures, moral codes, and religious beliefs. All had adapted to the particular environments in which they lived. The idea of private land ownership was foreign; land was held communally and worked collectively.”

A map of the continental U.S. shows the locations of all 326 American Indian reservations. There are none in any of the 26 states east of the Mississippi River. Yet in 1492, many Native American nations existed in the geographic area that became those 26 states. The total area of Native American reservations is only 2.3 percent of the land area of the continental United States.

White men’s despicable treatment of Native Americans, along with the enslavement of Black people and the imprisonment of Japanese citizens in internment camps during World War II, are all terrible parts of our history. Some of their terrible consequences are still very much with us.