ABSTRACT
A review of the tailings of North America’s “Indian wars” helps to uncover some of the violence that Grant’s presidential speeches conceal. Prior to becoming president, Grant served as a general in the US Army from 1864 to 1869, which was a time of increasing, widespread, and indiscriminate military and societal violence against “Indians.” During this time, the Northern Plains had become an area of heightened interest to western expansionists, industrialists, and political hopefuls. New world logic, along with the meteoric rise of race ideology in the 18th century, helped to continually renew the coaxial powers of Western hegemony and white supremacy. An assertion of white nativism-as-nationalism emerged and, with it, the conceptualization of a new Native American. The idea that “Indians” challenges that only white, Western, heteropatriarchal normativity can subdue is a logic that has extended the utility of “the Indian” within and beyond the geographical boundaries of the United States.
