What might have been: Native American armed resistance
A common meme passed about by advocates of gun rights features four Native American men armed with rifles—including two that are lever-actions, the assault rifles or at least pistol-caliber carbines of the nineteenth century—with the caption, “Homeland Security: Fighting terrorism since 1492.”
I included above this article the original photograph that is used for the meme since it is a picture of Geronimo, his son, and two fellow warriors around the time of their surrender to U.S. Army forces in 1886, thereafter to be used as an exhibition piece of the tamed savage in various parades and road shows, including at Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 inauguration.
Which is to say, that war on terrorism went about as well as the one that the United States conducted in the twenty-first century. As much as the idea amuses some contemporary gun owners with fantasies of a civil war, suggestions that had the indigenous peoples of the Americas been armed with modern guns, they could have fought off the white invaders are something that needs a good deal of analysis before being accepted.
To begin with, the native tribes faced the same problem that the Confederacy experienced, be they the peoples who inhabited the western hemisphere during the time of Spanish conquests or the ones who faced the bluecoats as the U.S. government expanded its territorial claims westward after the South’s defeat. One side had an industrial base for the manufacture of weapons that the other lacked. Toledo steel or Springfield Model 1861s firing Minié bullets in the aggregate will generally overwhelm the most courageous of insurgent fighters using homemade arms and enduring spotty logistics.
I did write “generally” there, since the wars of the second half of the twentieth and the years so far of the twenty-first centuries have shown that resistance movements can fight back effectively, especially when they know how to use the weapons of their well equipped invaders and can appropriate some of that material boon for their own use.
One key factor in the rolling waves of colonizers taking lands away from the natives was that of disease, as Jared Diamond writes about in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Populations that are not resistant to infectious organisms will be at a disadvantage against those with at least some immunity, a fact worthy of consideration by American gun owners today as COVID still stalks the world and who knows how many pandemics lie in wait in animal reservoirs. Had large portions of the people living on this side of the world not died soon after contact with Europeans—perhaps ninety percent—the excellence of Spanish steel and soldiers would not have been enough, being shipped across the Atlantic in fleets of a few dozen tiny ships at a time.
The many stories of native defeats could also have gone another way had the people in question possessed different political systems. Cortez and his men had firearms and swords, but that small band did not conquer an empire of several million inhabitants, no matter how well armed the attackers were, without the aid of disgruntled subject peoples. The uprising of the Modoc in 1873 in the border areas of California and Oregon, led by Kintpuash, otherwise known as Captain Jack, ended when the insurgents surrendered to the U.S. Army, but that was only after some of the Modoc had been persuaded to betray their leader. And though some groups in the Americas had organized societies that in many ways rivaled the kingdoms of Europe, most of the tribes that faced the military of the United States were the equivalent of the Celts and Gauls fighting the Romans—courageous and skilled, but hopelessly outmoded in bringing individual gallantry against warfare by organized divisions.
And yet, the Somalis and the Iraqis and the Afghans and the Viet Cong and on and on managed to accomplish the seemingly impossible—in some cases, against more than one nation’s military—and the Maquis made life increasingly unpleasant for the Germans and their collaborators prior to that. There are lessons to be learned from all of this.
Many of us on the left, especially in the liberal democracies of the West, have all too often been averse to acquiring a sound knowledge of military history, doctrine both strategic and tactical, and organization or of competency with arms. Ideally, the institutions of a free press and elections will preserve stability and the exercise of human rights, but with the rise of Trumpism in America and similar forms of fascism around the world, we need options in reserve, options that involve knowing how to assemble and employ a force of resistance.
Could the native peoples of the Americas have done that? Change this element of political structure, add in that bit of technology, weaken this virus, and who knows? What we today can do is to make the prospect of a new civil war or of a coup to impose a dictatorship so unpalatable as to dissuade the fantasists in the right wing or failing that to offer such a fight in reply as to exhaust their will.
But the relevant knowledge and skills will not force themselves upon us.