Contextualizing Violence

our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." When governor of Virginia (1780), Thomas Jefferson stated: "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."

Contextualizing Violence

To understand the violence perpetrated upon Native Alaska women it is important to

understand the pervasiveness of violence in history and contemporary times. It begs the question,

why do humans kill, maim, torture, harass, intimidate, threaten, rape, murder, abuse, enslave,

exploit, and hurt one another? The answer is not simple. Whether or not violence is a natural,

normal human condition has forever occupied the minds of scientists, philosophers, religious

leaders, historians, and journalists. Violence in its many dimensions, from postured threats to

what journalist Chris Hedges (2006) calls war – organized murder – has been a sickeningly

constant visage in the face of all societies throughout human history. Whether one lived in a

hunter-gather community, a village, town, city, or an empire, the specter of violence has haunted

all humans. In other words, “We are always shadowed by the threat of other humans harming

us” (Sapolsky, 2017, p. 2):

We have the means to create thousands of mushroom clouds; shower heads and subway ventilation systems have carried poison gas, letters have carried anthrax, passenger planes have become weapons; mass rapes can constitute a military strategy; bombs go off in markets, school children with guns massacre other children; there are neighborhoods where everyone from pizza delivery guys to firefighters fears for their safety. And there are the subtler versions of violence – say, a childhood of growing up abused, or the effects on a minority people when the symbols of the majority shout domination and menace” (p. 2)

Beyond our fear and anxiety of human on human violence, as a part of our evolutionary

heritage, we have learned to fear the violence that comes from being crushed, swallowed, eaten,

stomped, and squeezed to death by large animals (Dunn, 2012). In other words, we are primed to

take flight, freeze, or react with violence in order to protect ourselves from these threats. Some of

us live in dreadful fear of being stung by insects, bitten spiders, or eaten by sea creatures large

and small. We cower at the thought of being clawed by large birds or gored by animals with

sharp, menacing horns. And, of course, we fear coming in contact with fuzzy little creatures

called mice. We live in fear of violent weather, earthquakes, tsunamis, erupting volcanos,

abductions by aliens, hauntings by ghosts, having our Facebook hacked, or being eternally cast

into hell, “a spiritual realm of evil and suffering, often traditionally depicted as a place of

perpetual fire beneath the earth where the wicked are punished after death.”

Early White settlers lived their lives creating, advancing stories, and living in fear of

Indigenous peoples as the savage, bestial archetype who is bloody-thirsty, barbarous,

cannibalistic, violent, and wild. In an interview discussing his book, ‘The Barbarous Years…”

Pulitzer prize winning historian Bernard Bailyn (2013) says that the Antichrist obsessions of early

American colonialists left them in a state of dread. This thinking drove “elemental fears peculiar

to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized

people in an unimaginable wilderness...in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves]

were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world

around them.” Indeed, astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan (1997) speaking of the inability of

humans to be thoughtfully skeptical said, “We live in a demon-haunted world.”

However, the idea that violence was equally widespread among humans and that it is a

part of our human history, was missing during the period of invasion and colonization of the

Americas. The concept of violence was appropriated and colonized by the west as it came to

believe that white Christian people were the exception: they were a civilized, chosen race, who

were cast in the image of God, and destined to rule over all other peoples and the earth. Award

winning Canadian author Ronald Wright (1992, p. 6) termed this phenomenon self-apotheosis or

the white god myth:

“Another of Europe’s hoariest ideas about America is the self-apotheosis known as the white god myth. According to this, the natives were so overawed by the strange white men, the guns, and the horses that they mistook the invaders for god.”

Any violence that white settlers committed against peoples who were not White or

Christian appears to be done under the approving eye of God, or at least the Pope, long

considered by the Roman Catholic Church to be God’s representative on earth. On May 4,

1493, Pope Alexander VI issued The Papal Bull "Inter Caetera," (also referred to as the Doctrine

of Discovery) which served as the centerpiece of the Spanish attempted conquest of the “New

World.” This edict said that any land that was not inhabited by Christians was available to be

discovered, claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and declared that the Catholic faith and

the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls

be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.

(https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/doctrine-discovery-1493).

Those barbarous nations were comprised of Indigenous Peoples who were regarded as

possessing all of the dark human traits and imbued with natural tendencies towards violence,

savagery, bloodlust, sexual deviance, and cannibalism. Some early views of Native peoples were

derived from the “noble savage” archetype who was cast as a wild human who was not

blemished by civilization and symbolized man’s innate goodness. But this view did hang around

too long. Professor Ronald Takaki (1993) writes that in the early American colonies there were

two views of Native Americans. In Virginia, “Indian savagery was viewed largely as cultural:

Indians were ignorant heathens. In New England, however, “Indians had come to be

condemned as a demonic race, their dark complexions signifying an indelible and inherent evil”