The Business of Killing Indians
Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America
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How colonial conquest was driven by state-sponsored, profit-driven campaigns to murder and mutilate Indian peoples in North America
From the mid-1600s through the late 1800s, states sponsored scalp bounties and volunteer campaigns to murder and mutilate thousands of Indians throughout North America. Since central governments in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Mexico City, and Washington, DC, failed to provide adequate military support and financial resources for colonial frontier defense, administrators in regional capitals such as New York, Québec City, New Orleans, Boston, Ciudad Chihuahua, Austin, and Sacramento took matters into their own hands. At different times and in almost every part of the continent, they paid citizens for killing Indians, taking Indians captive, scalping or beheading Indians, and undertaking other forms of performative violence.
As militant operatives and civilians alike struggled to prevail over Indigenous forces they considered barbaric and savage, they engaged in not just plundering, slaving, and killing but also dismembering corpses for symbolic purposes and for profit. Although these tactics mostly failed in their intent to exterminate populations, state sponsorship of indiscriminate violence took a significant demographic toll by flooding frontier zones with murderous units whose campaigns diminished Indigenous power, reduced tribal populations, and forced weakened survivors away from traditional homelands. High wages for volunteer campaigning, along with cash bounties for Indian body parts and the ability to take captives and keep valuable plunder, promoted a state-sponsored profit opportunity for civilians.
About this Author
William S. Kiser is professor of history and chair of the history department at Texas A&M University-San Antonio.
Reviews
"Combining nuanced analysis, forceful narrative, and sensitivity to historical and contemporary Indigenous perspectives, William Kiser advances our understanding of genocide in North America by focusing on the practice of 'scalp warfare' over three centuries."--Jeffrey Ostler, author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas
"In this sharp, disturbing book, Billy Kiser follows the bloody tracks of scalp hunters across centuries and around the continent. His journey reveals the wretched commonality of this state-sanctioned form of violence against Indigenous People."--Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War
"In the growing literature on Indigenous genocide, William Kiser has given us the most thorough account of the state-funded destruction of Native peoples, the vigorous trade in body parts, and grisly boasts of organized slaughter. Ranging from Canada to Mexico, New England to California, Kiser's straightforward but detailed account will leave readers with a profoundly unsettling sense of a three-century catalogue of horror."--Elliott West, author of Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion
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