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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <a
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href="https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/TRR">https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/TRR</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">The impact of the Transcontinental
Railroad on Native Americans</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Sam Vong, June 3, 2019 <br>
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<p>The Transcontinental Railroad was completed 150
years ago, in 1869. In 1800s America, some saw the
railroad as a symbol of modernity and national
progress. For others, however, the Transcontinental
Railroad undermined the sovereignty of Native
nations and threatened to destroy Indigenous
communities and their cultures as the railroad
expanded into territories inhabited by Native
Americans. </p>
<p>I asked Dr. Manu Karuka, American Studies scholar
and author of <em>Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous
Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental
Railroad</em>, about the impact of the railroad on
Indigenous peoples and nations. <br>
</p>
<p><strong>Traditional histories of the
Transcontinental Railroad often exclude Native
Americans. How does including Indigenous peoples
and nations transform these familiar narratives?</strong></p>
<p>Indigenous people are often present in railroad
histories, but they form a kind of colorful backdrop
that establishes the scene. Rarely, if ever, do we
get an understanding of the interests that drove
Indigenous peoples’ actions in relation to the
railroad. Rather than analyzing Indigenous peoples’
commitments to their communities and their
homelands, railroad histories have emphasized market
competition and westward expansion. Focusing on
Indigenous histories reveals how Indigenous nations
have survived colonialism. <br>
</p>
<p><strong>Your new book reinterprets the building of
the railroad as a colonial project. Your book also
challenges readers to consider the
Transcontinental Railroad as a form of
“continental imperialism.” Colonialism and
imperialism are two very distinct processes. How
are they different, and how are they related in
your analysis of the Transcontinental Railroad?</strong></p>
<p>The Oxford English Dictionary defines colonialism
as “colonization by settlement.” In the case of the
U.S., Canada, and other settler colonies,
colonialism is a process that replaces existing,
Indigenous communities and ways of relating to the
land with settler populations, and settler ways of
life. </p>
<p>The Transcontinental Railroad facilitated the
colonization of western territories by encouraging
new settlements on Indigenous lands. </p>
<p>This colonization was an extension of what I call
“continental imperialism.” I draw from the work of
W.E.B. Du Bois and Vladimir Lenin to understand
imperialism as a process through which finance
capital becomes ascendant over industrial capital.
This results in the increasing concentration of
wealth under fewer hands, through corporate trusts
and mergers. Du Bois and Lenin argued that the
hyper-concentration of wealth led to the territorial
division of the world. Railroads were a core
infrastructure of imperialism in North America,
Africa, Asia, and Latin America.</p>
<p><strong>What roles did Native Americans play during
the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad?</strong></p>
<p>It is important to distinguish between different
nations and their relationships to the railroad. The
railroad did not impact Native peoples in a uniform
manner.</p>
<p>Lakotas, for example, had developed a way of life
organized around the expansiveness of the Plains and
of the life on it, especially the massive buffalo
herds. As the Lakota writer and political leader
Luther Standing Bear described it, Lakota people
moved through their land, following buffalo herds.
“Moving day was just like traveling from one nice
home to another.” When the Union Pacific Railroad
was being built, Lakota expansiveness confronted the
expansionist drive of the United States. This
represented two distinct and competing ways of
living in relationship to the land and the living
beings on it. <br>
</p>
<p>The Cheyenne experience was different. The railroad
disrupted intertribal trade on the Plains, and
thereby broke a core aspect of Cheyenne economic
life. Cheyennes responded to this crisis by
developing annuity economies, based around regular
payments by the U.S. federal government, as
stipulated in treaties, and raiding economies. This
signaled a long-term strategic shift within Cheyenne
communities.</p>
<p>Other Indigenous peoples found themselves drawn
into a closer relationship with railroad
construction. For instance, some Pawnee men worked
as scouts for the U.S. Army, defending railroad
construction parties. Their work provided an avenue
to wage labor, shaped in a historical context of the
imposition of commercial farming and boarding
schools on Pawnees. Both of these impositions sought
to replace Pawnee women’s agricultural and
pedagogical work and relationships.</p>
<p><strong>How did the U.S. government’s role in
railroad construction affect Indigenous peoples?</strong></p>
<p>The U.S. Congress granted millions of acres of land
to railroad companies. According to treaties
ratified by Congress, these lands belonged to
different Indigenous nations. In other words,
Congress granted land to railroad companies that was
not legally under its control. The different forms
of Indigenous resistance to railroad construction
were neither savage nor illegal. These were forms of
resistance to uphold treaties, the supreme law of
the land. </p>
<p>The possibility of Indigenous resistance posed
risks to investors. In response, the U.S. government
enlisted the U.S. Army to ensure that resistance
could be contained. The Army and state militias
enforced the progress of construction through
military occupation of Indigenous communities,
deliberately targeting villages and food sources.
This took the form of massacres of entire villages,
as at Sand Creek and Blue Water Creek; assassination
of tribal diplomatic leaders; attempts to isolate
children from their families; and the wholesale
destruction of the buffalo herds. The goal was to
destroy the ability of Indigenous nations to contest
the invasion and occupation of their lands. The
railroads themselves facilitated these military
tactics by enabling swift troop and supply movements
over great distances in harsh weather. </p>
<p>Despite the efforts of both railroad officials and
military authorities, Indigenous peoples resisted.
In the summer of 1867, for example, Cheyenne raids
led to the complete disruption of railroad
construction. Massive villages conducted strategic
attacks on military outposts, settler communities,
and the overland trail, completely isolating Denver
from the United States for a time.</p>
<p>Resistance continued well after the completion of
the Transcontinental Railroad. In 1873, Lakotas took
up armed resistance against the Northern Pacific
Railroad’s illegal incursion of their homelands.
Despite genocidal violence and ecological
destruction, the Indigenous nations invaded by
railroad colonialism are still here today. Some are
at the forefront of contemporary struggles against
fracking, pipelines, coal mining, and monopoly
agro-business.</p>
<p><strong>What are some of the challenges in telling
a history of the Transcontinental Railroad through
the lens of Native Americans?</strong></p>
<p>Corporate, military, and Indian Office officials
created documents to facilitate the capture of
Indigenous lands and the exploitation of Chinese
labor. For example, I have read census records of
Paiute Native Americans that tabulate the size of
populations, and “propensity to labor,” with
question marks next to each number recorded. These
records have been cited in scholarship as facts,
essentially removing the question marks. In other
words, historians have cited supposed facts from
documents that actually recorded rumors. A core
challenge for historians working in these archives
is to expose these rumors, and the impulse behind
them, rather than repeating them at face value. In a
larger sense, I think there is work for all of us to
better understand the histories of the places where
we live, rather than repeating the stories we have
been told. For the great majority of us, I think our
survival depends on it.</p>
<p><em>Sam Vong is a curator of Asian Pacific American
history at the National Museum of American
History.</em></p>
<p><em>Manu Karuka is an assistant professor of
American Studies at Barnard College.</em></p>
<p><em><br>
</em></p>
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