11 - A ‘Spreading Fire’

Summary

For decades, historians have expressed divergent perspectives on the question of genocide in North America. These debates often hinged on legal technicalities and narrow political definitions of genocidal “intent.” This chapter takes a more robust view of the causes of genocidal violence early colonial North America. Paying particular attention to the contested terrain of historical causation, the following chapter encourages readers to remain cognizant of the overlapping, intersecting, and competing ideas, motives, and patterns of mass violence that shaped, and reshaped, North America prior to the Revolutionary era. From New England to Michigan Territory, the Chesapeake Bay to southern Appalachia, Indigenous nations navigated preexisting rivalries while also grappling with the arrival of often-aggressive European colonizers. As the bloody history of the Kikotan people in early-seventeenth-century Virginia reveals, the perpetrators of genocide came in many forms. And when violence did come, it caused social discord and the loss of life and culture as the violence of settler greed, ambition, a brute force took root and extended across eastern North America like a “spreading fire.”