Erasing Indigenous Power: Empire: Total War, Native Americans, and White Supremacist Mythology

Creative Assembly’s 2007 Empire: Total War allows the player to take control of an 18^th century polity and work to conquer the world—be it England or France or Prussia or the Ottomans or the Maratha Confederacy. Of the three maps for play and conquest, however, North America offers no native polities for the player in the base game. The Native groups represented are given ahistorical territories, tribes and polities are subsumed into oversimplified landmasses representative of colonial treaties like Fort Stanwix and Hard Labor rather than existing land claims and interrelations, and deliberately turned into “primitive” cultures. Among other areas, this is particularly apparent in the depiction of Native agriculture, something that has been repeatedly debunked in scholarly literature. All of this is, of course, a representation of ongoing white supremacist mythologies, the narrative of settler-colonialism that demands replacement of indigenous peoples—much like in the game itself.