A World Awash in Guns: The Arming of Indian Country and Some Implications for US Culture

This presentation will revisit the themes of my 2015 book, Thundersticks, and their implications for the history of gun culture and race in the United States. I contend that the munitions trade was one of the most significant features of colonialism for Native people. In one region after another, intertribal arms races and gun wars erupted as soon as Indigenous people had access to European weaponry. It took little time before Native people were more thoroughly armed and skilled with guns than their White neighbors. Thundersticks focuses on the results within Indian Country: the relentless warfare, captive-taking, slave-raiding, and casualties. My AHA presentation will address the effects of these phenomena on White America. In particular, I will emphasize that American culture from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries was profoundly shaped by hostilities with Indigenous people. Every region, at one point or another, was a war zone filled with mutual atrocities. Consequently, nearly every community in these zones was heavily armed. After the fighting, memories of these horrors lived on in cultural productions, contributing significantly to racial ideologies in which Whites imagined themselves as divinely ordained to possess the continent and of Indians as damned to extinction. Native people responded with their own racial theory of separate creations, as well as with prophetic movements that anticipated the Great Spirit sweeping away Whites and their military might. These developments continue to resonate in American society to this very day.