Putting a price on Indigenous lives

Beginning in the 17th century, as European nations competed for territory in North America and immigrants struggled to settle the land, Indigenous inhabitants were killed and disfigured for pay. Drawing examples from three centuries, from 17th-century New France and New England to 18th-century Texas-Mexico borderlands to 19th-century Pacific Coast territories, historian William Kiser narrates the history of racial hatred and promises of financial reward that motivated the butchery of human beings by volunteer bounty hunters.

Accounts of gratuitous disfigurement and performative violence have been known throughout human history. Gospel writers Matthew and Mark record that Herodias, princess of the Herodian dynasty of Judea, called for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Ancient Roman occupiers made public displays of crucified people. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African Americans in the South were lynched in public displays. In 2013, political scientist Lee Ann Fujii coined the phrase “extra-lethal violence” to describe face-to-face lethal violence that deliberately transgresses norms about the treatment of human bodies in order to achieve political or financial gain. Kiser analyzes this disturbing topic broadly, framing the scalping of Native people for pay by European killers and their Native allies as extirpative in intent.

Underlying scalp warfare during the centuries of European settlement was the belief that Native people were subhuman and therefore could be stalked and killed for money. While the practice varied, it remained rooted in a common factor: racial hatred. Kiser’s comment on an early French policy of supporting small paramilitary groups by paying them for indiscriminate killing and scalping applies throughout the book: There was “a perception of non-Christianized Indians as ‘savage’—and thus fit for scalping.” Performative violence against Native people ultimately was aimed at genocide. Looking back through the lens of the 1948 Genocide Convention at the United Nations, Kiser concludes that “scalp warfare was almost always genocidal in its intent, [if] less often genocidal in its outcome.”