From Tsenacommacah to Gaza: 400 Years of Colonial Occupation Forces, 1624-2024

From Tsenacommacah to Gaza: 400 Years of Colonial Occupation Forces, 1624-2024

This July 4 2024 marks 271 days since the genocide in Gaza began, an unending and brutalizing campaign of terror that has killed at least 37,900 Palestinians through indiscriminate airstrikes and ground troop invasions throughout the entire region. “Families live amid mountains of trash and streams of water contaminated by sewage” as Israeli Occupation Forces escalate their tactics of total war and kettle displaced families into crude refugee camps. These crowded “tent cities” have made already dire conditions unsustainable as disease spreads rapidly and occupying forces show no signs of respecting the boundaries of “humanitarian zones” of their own designation. One of the most insidious facets of total war, however, one known to the IOF and their colonial compatriots in North America, is hunger, and we are now witnessing the effects of this demographic disaster “leaving more than 500,000 Palestinians on the brink of starvation”.  Whether it be Hitler’s “Der Hungerplan”, or the denying of food trucks at the Egyptian border entering Gaza, the tactic of submission through starvation has one common ancestor, and it can be found throughout the earliest days of colonial occupation in North America.

While there were earlier attempts at permanent colonization/extraction attempted in North America in the early 16 century, it is the thorough account of Hernando de Soto’s march of terror that offers the closest glimpse into the origins of these well-honed colonial methods of total war. De Soto, along with nearly 700 men, war dogs, hogs for their food, and all imaginable modern weaponry and supplies available to them, landed in “La Florida” or modern-day Tampa Bay, in May of 1538, and quickly set off in search of similar mineral wealth that had been thefted while “conquering” Peru and Mexico. Their circuitous path of terror took De Soto and his army zig zagging through the southeastern pine savannahs, hardwood forests, edges of the Blue Ridge, and tributary waters of the Mississippi, leading to interactions with many of the socially and materially complex Indigenous Nations of the interior. The sickness of the Spanish greed, however, could not be satiated by the warm hospitality offered to them, nor were they impressed with the river pearls and hammered copper presented when locals were pressed with the demand for gold, often leading to outcomes that are so horrifying that it is hard for the mind to fully comprehend the brutality.

Charles Hudson’s Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun, offers as near a complete rundown of the day to day activities of the De Soto expedition that exists today, with the monotony of their mission regularly punctuated with bursts of cruelty that range from forced enslavement of Native people, thieving/destroying local food supplies, and when deemed necessary, wholesale extermination of towns and cities. “In passing through villages of some of the principal men, De Soto ordered his men to cut down and destroy their large cornfields.” pg. 202. A vivid portrayal of De Soto’s depraved violence can be found in the complete destruction of Mabila, a large Native city in the vicinity of the lower Cahawba River, possibly the same site as a former confederate prison near a historic site with large Indigenous earthworks. On October 18, 1540, De Soto and 40 horsemen arrived in the city of Mabila and were greeted by “the chief of Mabila…accompanied by many Indians singing and playing on flutes”. Sadly, like many of De Soto’s interactions with local Indigenous people, the Spaniards reverted to deadly force as soon any noncompliance was detected, and after a two-day battle following an attack/counterattack, De Soto left the entire city burned, food stores raided, and over 3,000 in Mabila dead. “One group of men and women still fought with utmost desperation. All of them were killed, because none of them would surrender.” Hudson pg. 243.

De Soto’s mission would ultimately fail, as would many of the Spanish attempts to forcibly colonize “La Florida”, but it was only after the disastrous “Ajacan” mission in modern day Virginia that the Spanish chose to retreat from the region, leaving it open for English exploitation, and greatly weakened by nearly a century of war and pan European disease events. The English were wholly unprepared for life in Tsenacommacah (Coastal Virginia and its tributary waterways) and struggled to survive during the first several years of occupation, almost solely relying on food obtained by bartering with nearby Powhatan communities. During a period of famine for both the English and Powhatan Nations in 1609, and disappearance of two English scouts, a war party led by Captains John Smith and George Percy, “burned their [the Nansemonds’] howses, ransacked their Temples, Tooke downe the Corpses of their deade kings from their Toambes, and Caryed away their pearles Copper and braceletts, wherewith they doe decore their kings funeralles”, thus igniting the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609-14), which had no clear victor, and only served to further destabilized relations between the colonists and Indigenous Nations. “[In March 1614] At present-day West Point, where the York and Mattaponi rivers meet, the Englishmen disembarked and faced down several hundred Indians. When, after two days, neither side was willing to fire first, the colonists returned to Jamestown. The war ended on a note of anticlimax.”

An uneasy peace remained for nearly eight years, in which time the Virginia Company of London was officially dissolved and turned over to the King of England and his advisors. All the while, Englishmen continued their encroachment into Powhatan territory, hell bent on establishing tobacco as the backbone of the colonial economy. The “peace” was eventually broken in 1622, when the settlers at Jamestown were suffering from a myriad of disease and health effects brought on by the terrible living conditions at their settlement. Led by Powhatans brother, Opechancanough, and warriors from allied Nations in Tsenacommacah, the Powhatan launched an attack “so sudden…that few or none discerned the weapon or blow that brought them to destruction”, leading to the start of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622-32). Opechancanough’s fatal mistake was to not completely destroy the colony at Jamestown, leaving time for the English to regroup and plan retaliatory efforts against the Powhatan. Instead, “[Powhatans younger brother] Opitchapam and Opechancanough followed through after their victory with studied silence rather than with additional raids, evidently assuming that a single devastating blow would communicate their message.” The English, still unstable from near constant calorie deficiency, planned “To lull them the better in securitie [and] sought no revenge till thier corne was ripe.”

The Second Anglo-Powhatan war took a terrible turn in May of 1623 when Opechancanough and his allied Powhatan Nations met with an English delegation upriver of Jamestown along the James River [then known as the Powhatan River] in Pamunkey territory. “At the meeting, the English called for a toast to seal the agreement, gave the Indians poisoned wine, and then fired upon them, injuring as many as 150, including Opechancanough and the chief of the Kiskiack.” The only “full scale” battle following this traitorous interaction occurred in the summer of 1624 at the site of a “key Powhatan town” occupied by the Pamunkey, later being referred to as one of many “feede fights” between the colonists and the Powhatan. “For two days the two sides fought to a stalemate. While the struggle continued on the open battlefield, a few Englishmen took advantage of the diversion to burn the Indians’ fields, destroying enough food, the governor’s Council claimed, “to have sustained four thousand men for a twelve-month.” When the Powhatan Indians finally realized the extent of the damage, they “gave over fightinge and dismayedly, stood most ruthfully lookinge one while theire corne was cutt downe.” The colonists, even facing their own risk of starvation during the upcoming winter, realized the Powhatan would not anticipate such extreme cruelty, and with this action, solidified a practice that became commonplace in the centuries ahead.

Dr. Helen Rountree’s expands on this process in her 1973 PhD dissertation “Indian Land Loss in Virginia: A Prototype of U.S. Federal Indian Policy”, wherein the English settlers continued their starvation and total war tactics out of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War and into the Third (1644-46). “Like the previous one, it was carried out by killing Indians, cutting down their corn, destroying their canoes, and burning their towns. As before, the Indians found that the English were willing and able to exact a fearful price for a massacre.” As the 17 century came to a close, reservation systems were installed (Pamunkey 1646), as well as boarding schools/concentration camps, in an attempt to stifle thousands of years of inherited tradition. And in a total insult to decades of diplomacy between the English colonial government and the Virginia Indian Nations, many treaties made before the founding of the United States would be null and void after its establishment in 1776. General Andrew Jackson surely took inspiration from Jefferson’s policy regarding the removal of the Cherokee when implementing the federal removal of the Southeastern Indian Nations during the “Trail of Tears” some 50 years later, a forced removal policy that resulted in disaster when “Private companies failed to deliver food and supplies, and about four thousand Cherokee died of starvation and disease during the journey.”

By the end of the 19 century, federal policy in forcibly relocating and exterminating the North American Indigenous Nations had reached a mechanized scale and pace. New rail infrastructure and advanced weaponry such as the Winchester repeating rifle transformed the landscape of the western territories with a ferocity that, until that time, was unimaginable to both the settlers and the local Indigenous Nations. Native resistance grew as western settler migration quickened its pace, and in the second half of the 19 century, echoing the settler/Indigenous dynamic in colonial Virginia, interactions between the two usually ended in extreme violence. Taking lessons from other brutalizing regimes in North American history, the U.S. Army decided to implement a starvation tactic during their own period of total war. This was achieved not by destroying the fertile corn fields of the Eastern Woodlands, but instead, the extermination of the American bison. “In 1867, one member of the U.S. Army is said to have given orders to his troops to ‘kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.’” While this practice was never official government policy, the words of those who willingly participated, and encouraged the extermination of the American bison, speak for themselves. U.S. Army officer Philip Sheridan was even quoted in 1875 saying, “Let them [white hunters] kill, skin, and sell, until the buffalo if exterminated. It is the only way to bring a lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.”

The reverberations of this unchecked colonial violence continued into the 20^th century with Virginia, as well as its western cousin California, leading the country in its newly minted policy of American eugenics, where thousands of Indigenous/Black men, women, and children were forcibly sterilized and made to endure the “statistical genocide” of expunging their Tribal identity through the bureau of vital statistics, labeling them as “Colored” instead of “Indian”. During this time, American eugenicists communicated openly with members of the burgeoning Nazi party, and there is little doubt that the Third Reich took notes from this strict hierarchy of American racial capitalism. Simon Moya-Smith at Indian Country Today expands on this in the 2018 piece “Ugly Precursor to Auschwitz: Hitler Said to Have Been Inspired by US Indian Reservation System”, saying, “Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history…He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.” This policy would come into clearer focus as the Nazi’s expanded their Soviet invasion with “Der Hungerplan”, which resulted in “Approximately 7 million Soviet civilians, Jews and gentiles alike”, as well as tens of thousands in the Nazi ghettos and concentration camps.

Today we witness similar genocidal tactics of “starvation and uneven combat” in the 271 day genocide of occupied Palestinian territory. A new report by the ICP says “About 96 percent of the population in the Gaza Strip (2.15M people) face high levels of acute food insecurity through September 2024 … While the whole territory is classified in Emergency … over 495,000 people (22 percent of the population) are still facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity…In this phase, households experience an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities.” This last week, in a shameless act to try and hide the carnage unfolding in Gaza, “lawmakers have barred the U.S. State Department from citing death toll figures provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health”, which will only further obscure the impacts of the growing famine/forced starvation in occupied Palestinian territories, all while Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant discussed another “$6.5 billion” in aid with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin during a recent “productive” visit to Washington DC. This July 2024 marks the 400 anniversary of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War’s “feede fights”, the “Der Hungerplan” of colonial Virginia, a blueprint for starvation tactics used by occupation forces since the 16 century in North America. The genocide of Palestinians is just a contemporary iteration of the forced removal of an Indigenous population at the hands of an empathy-less colonial power. What could be more American than a genocide being fueled by the original architects of “Indian Removal Policy”. Free Palestine.