CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

“Exterminate the Brutes”: From American Concentration Camps to Contemporary Imperialism

Nez Perce Camp at Big Hole massacre site, Montana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

”Native Americans will tenaciously defend the legal, political and cultural boundaries of their sovereignty using every means available to American citizens: voting, protesting, petitioning, lobbying, marching and litigating.” – Paul Rosier, Indigenous Citizens: Native Americans’ Fight for Sovereignty 1776-2025

”Native Americans will tenaciously defend the legal, political and cultural boundaries of their sovereignty using every means available to American citizens: voting, protesting, petitioning, lobbying, marching and litigating.”

– Paul Rosier, Indigenous Citizens: Native Americans’ Fight for Sovereignty 1776-2025

L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz boasts a large cast of characters: Munchkins; a tribe of flying jungle monkeys; a Good Witch and a Wicked Witch; a girl named Dorothy, her dog Toto and their companions on the red brick road, as well as a Wizard who turns out to be a fraud. It doesn’t feature any Indians, perhaps because Baum called for the total annihilation of the Indians who lived in and around Kansas, Dorothy’s home state. In editorials published in the Saturday Pioneer, a small town newspaper in December 1890—soon after the U.S. Seventh Cavalry shot and killed several hundred Indians, most of them women and children—Baum wrote, “The Whites by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.”

Those words appeared in an editorial published after the death on December 15, 1890 of Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota warrior who led resistance to American imperialism and colonialism. In a second no less virulent editorial published after the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, Baum wrote, “our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. He added, “wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

“Exterminate the Brutes,” Mr. Kurtz exclaims in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899). Colonialists around the world have echoed his sentiments. A 2021 HBO mini-series titled Exterminate the Brutes, inspired in large part by Sven Lindvuist’s book of the same name, traces the history of colonialism and imperialism. (Edward Said once explained to me that “imperialism” was the theory and “colonialism” the practice). Ironically, Mr. Kurtz begins his journey into the heart of darkness wanting to bring light and civilization to the Congolese. Like many colonists he had high ideals.

I had to read about Belgian brutality in the Congo before I learned about American brutality from Massachusetts to California in books like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown and Luther Standing Bear’s Land of the Spotted Eagle in which he wrote “Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infected’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame.” He added, “When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the........

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