The Rhetoric of Extermination:

Scapegoating the Plains Indian in the 19^th Century

Ruth Schlein

I. INTRODUCTION: Retelling the Story of the Sand Creek Massacre

By the late 1800s most buffalo had disappeared during the mass slaughters, and the American Indians living east of the Mississippi had been pushed out of the land they were in, or annihilated. The Cheyenne, one of the Native American tribes who had been pushed West, had become a strong force on the Plains, threatening the United States Government and European settlers with their presence. The existence of the Cheyenne people presented an obstacle to the desired establishment of European settlement on the plains.

John Chivington was a steadfast Methodist minister who, instead of preaching in the church, became a colonel during the Civil War. Chivington had refused the position of chaplan that was offered to him and he had asked for a fighting position. Near the end of the Civil War, with no confederate soldiers to fight, Chivington dedicated himself to eliminating the presence of any living American Indian. In the 1860s Chivington had settled down and was living in Denver adamantly preaching his firm belief that the extermination of all American Indians was the only way to deal with the “Indian Problem.”  He declared, “It simply is not possible for Indians to obey or even understand any treaty.  I am fully satisfied, gentlemen, that to kill them is the only way we will ever have peace and quiet in Colorado” [1] . This policy of true extermination reflected the sentiment of the Denver populace (due to the recent attacks in Minnesota and in Denver that triggered fear and hatred among the populace).

During the 1860s Colonel Chivington headed the Colorado Third Regiment of volunteers, also known as the Bloodless Third. This name was soon to change to the Bloody Thirds. Colonel Chivington planned, led, and justified a surprise attack on Chief Black Kettle and the Cheyenne who were settled at Sand Creek. Black Kettle, a proponent of peace, had traveled to Denver in hopes of finding reconciliation with the Europeans so that the two sides could get along.  With no luck in Denver, Black Kettle announced his surrender and he took his people to Sand Creek thinking they would find safety there. Federal Army Officers in Denver had told Black Kettle and his men that they would be out of harm’s way at Sand Creek.

At dawn on November 29, 1864 the stripes and stars of the American flag and the white flag of peace hung high above the tee pees at Sand Creek. Chivington and his 700 volunteers charged into the camp with no recognition of this peace offering symbol. Chivington and his army murdered, scalped, and mutilated the dead bodies of men, women and children. He told the regiment to “Kill and scalp all, big and small; nits make lice” [2] . The Cheyenne women and children huddled under the flags of peace and reconciliation hoping for safety while others fought trying to defend themselves. Black Kettle thinking he spoke the truth had told all the women and children that they would be safe if they congregated under the flags. Women were mutilated and left alive to witness the rest of the battle, and others were shot down while pleading for mercy. Children carrying the white flags of peace were killed, and pregnant women were cut open. When the battle was over, more than two hundred Cheyenne lay dead and more than one-half of these dead were women and children [3] . The soldiers scalped and sexually mutilated the dead bodies.

            They appeared to think that they had rid themselves of an evil force that had caused tension in the community as Chivington and his men returned to Denver as great conquering soldiers. They paraded the body parts of the dead and innocent Cheyenne as trophies to the people. Three women and four children were caged and presented as animals in captivity to the Denver public [4] . Many of the Cheyenne turned into ruthless warriors after this attack on Sand Creek, dismissing any proposed peace agreements, in the name of their ancestors and tribesmen who had been dishonored and exterminated.  Eventually the Plains Indians found themselves in other violent massacres with frontiersmen and the United States Government, and were often murdered if not pushed into life on the reservations.

II. Thesis Statement and Setting a Theoretical Framework  

Why did the Sand Creek massacre and so many other attempts to exterminate the Native Americans occur in the late Nineteenth century? Sand Creek was one of the largest and most violent attacks, although those that were smaller and less brutal were still deeply disturbing and clearly collective acts of attempted extermination.  The exterminations were defended by the rhetoric of the frontiersmen and those in power. In this paper I will argue that official statements found in the nineteenth century justifying the violent extermination of the Plains Indians reveals a rhetoric that bears marks of persecution texts and this rhetoric puts the scapegoat mechanism to work. In addition, Rene Girard’s scapegoat mechanism is deeper than he himself admits, because there are multiple ways of implementing the scapegoat mechanism, many of which are both subtle and hard to detect.

At the time of the arrival of Europeans in what is now the United States, the Indian population was an estimated 800,000 to 2,000,000. By 1872 it had decreased to an estimated 300,000, excluding Alaska. War, disease, and famine had taken their toll, and the “vanishing American” became the view of the day [5] .

The turbulence of the nineteenth century was wrought by violence, slavery and genocide.  The United States had enslaved the black population and then after and during the Civil War the United States had became determined to control and own the country, which triggered the attempt to annihilate the American Indian populations. The American Indian posed a threat to the mutual desire for land and the desire for power. 

A theoretical framework must be set out in order to understand the argument of this paper.  As René Girard explains, the way to restore order in times of  crisis is through creating a scapegoat, a sacrificial victim to whom the violence in the group is redirected.  In times of internal cultural crises, a masked and nameless victim is chosen and violently destroyed by the community in order to maintain or create order in the community [6] . The Civil War and the desire for land caused a crisis, which set the scapegoat mechanism into action.  The scapegoat is destroyed by the collective violence of the community through ritual sacrifice to, theoretically, restore order.  “The victim is a scapegoat. Scapegoat indicates both the innocence of the victims, the collective polarization in opposition to them, and the collective end result of that polarization” [7] .  There are typical charges and usual suspects for choosing a scapegoat. “The victim comes from elsewhere, a well-known stranger” and his behavior is perceived as harmful [8] . The victim is often physically and culturally “other”.

What Girard calls mimetic desire is the desire to have what someone else desires. Mimetic desire triggers violence.  The crisis that triggered the scapegoat mechanism and violent sacrifice of the Plains Indians by Whites during the nineteenth century was the mimetic desire for land. Both sides desired the same object, but what they both valued in the object of desire was completely different. The difference in the value of the object is what caused the crisis. This puts a twist on Girard’s idea of mimetic desire because it was not the desire so much as how the object of mutual desire was valued that caused the crisis.  The American Indian wanted land as an open arena with no boundaries or limits. In contrast, the European wanted land for development and settlement, with divisions and boundaries. There was no way that both desires could be fulfilled. Even if the Plains Indians had been given a huge portion of land to own, this division and ownership would contradict Native American values. They didn’t want to own land. Hence, the crisis caused by mimetic desire was inevitable.

The scapegoat is determined through myth and the creation of myth involves pointing towards a loss of differentiation. The American Indians became victims because they were “other” and they blurred lines that created a loss of differentiation. The blurring of lines caused internal crisis in the community.  “The great social crises that engender collective persecutions are experienced as a lack of differentiation” [9] . In the extermination of the Plains Indians the loss of differentiation was found in three ways. First, the American Indian was often described as savage and on the line between human and animal. The Indian culture encouraged this blurring of lines through the use of totem animals in their spiritual lives while this blurring was terrifying for the European mind. The second place where the loss of differentiation is found is in the “half-breed” or “mixed bloods”. These people were children of Indian-White parentage and this mixing made the “half-breeds” marginal people living in liminal space between the two groups. The third loss of differentiation is found in the renegades, who were people that had abandoned white society to live with Indians and who claimed they would fight against their own kind [10] . Author Colin Calloway wrote in The Western Historical Quarterly in 1986 that,

Confusion, not conversion, typified the renegade experience. Too long regarded as the scum of the frontier, renegades were luckless byproducts of a clash of cultures and, in many cases, appear to have been victims of circumstance rather than treacherous villains [11] .

“Girardian” theory explains that the justification of scapegoating and sacrifice is allowed by means of the scapegoat mechanism.  There are specific stereotypes that indicate persecution and create victims. Girard writes of these stereotypes that,

Their existence convinces us that (1) the acts of violence are real; (2) the crisis is real; (3) the victims are chosen not for the crimes that they are accused for but for the victim’s signs that they bear, for everything that suggests their guilty relationship with the crisis; and (4) the import of the operation is to lay the responsibility for the crisis on the victims and to exert an influence on it by destroying these victims or at least banishing them from the community they “pollute” [12] .

Applying this to the Plains Indians in the nineteenth century we find that, (1) the acts of violence were clearly real, demonstrated by the many American Indians who were violently exterminated in large numbers over a long period of time; (2) the land was occupied by “savage” American Indians who both frightened and posed a threat to the “development of the civilization” of the country. Both the persecutors and the victims desired the same thing, land, and this caused a violent crisis; (3) the American Indians were “other”. They were both physically and socially different from the settlers and military personnel. Their skin was dark; they practiced a foreign religion, and spoke another language. Scientists began studies where they were classifying humanity according to the shape of the skull.  Phrenology, the now discredited study, examined the relationship between skull size and intelligence, which at the time they thought gave evidence to the inferior intelligence and the immorality of Native American people [13] ; and (4) the blame was put upon the Indians for being uncivilized and for preventing the development of “civilization”. The government would do anything to get the Indians out of their way and at times they murdered in masses.  The U.S. forces killed large groups, and they pushed the Native Americans out of the land they wanted to use (eventually into small reservations on land that is undesirable), or assimilated them into “civilized” beings in the European culture (a form of cultural genocide).

Girard uses the term “persecution texts” to describe works written by persecutors about their victims.  The rhetoric that reveals persecution is prevalent in the writings that justify the extermination of the Native American populations on the Plains. These persecution texts use language that exposes a combination of both a false and an accurate perspective on the situation.

In the case of a test written by the persecutors the only elements of it that should be believed are those that correspond (1) to the real circumstances of the texts coming into being, (2) to the characteristic traits of the usual victims, and (3) to the results that normally follow collective violence. …It is the partly accurate and partly false perspective of persecutors who are convinced of their own persecution [14] .

This is how Girard says we should analyze a persecution text.  Persecutors think they choose their victims because they are guilty of a specific crime, but really victims are chosen by persecutors for the “criteria of persecution that are faithfully reported to us, not because they want to inform us but because they are unaware of what they reveal” [15] . This rhetoric thus, reveals the scapegoat mechanism and the guilt of the Europeans for their dehumanizing behavior and words.

Official statements found in federal documents and other public news written by the persecutors of the American Indian population, can be examined to reveal persecution texts that put the scapegoat mechanism to work. The persecution of the Plains Indians was an attempt to create order and speed up the development of “Civilization” for the United States during a time of internal crisis. Myths were created to justify the violent massacres of the Plains Indians. These myths developed the image of the American Indian as barbarous, uncivilized, and savage in nature. The fallacy of these claims must be revealed to deconstruct the myths that attempt to validate the extermination of the Plains Indian and their culture.

The innumerable massacres of the Plains Indians during the Civil War and post-Civil War appear to be simply profane acts of collective violence, yet upon analyzing Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat mechanism we find a link between the sacred and profane. The American Indians were exterminated because they were made into scapegoats, and the scapegoat becomes a type of sacrifice.  How can the disturbingly brutal extermination of a people be a ritualized sacrifice or a sacred action? The violent massacres were not necessarily sacred, but some aspects of the violence were ritualistic. To begin, there is a ritual character to the repetition of exorcism as the troops systematically moved west expurgating the “evil”. Secondly, the military itself is based upon repetition and this created exceptionally ritualized action. In addition to the ritualistic aspect, this historical period made the victims sacred. Belief in the efficacy of a victim makes the victim sacred.  Ironically, by killing the American Indians (because they seem uncivilized and inhuman), they became sacred.  What made the scapegoat sacred was the belief that the scapegoat was so powerful that unless destroyed, the persecutor could not go on. The act of extermination was the only thing that could bring order to the turbulent crisis, and because the Indians were the only means to this “salvation”, the action of exterminating the Indian made him or her, once annihilated, a sacred being.

 In addition to Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat mechanism, Timothy K. Beal helps us understand how the Native Americans were made “other”.  In Religion and its Monsters, Timothy Beal explains how a monster is a personification of Sigmund Freud’s idea of the unheimlich. The unheimlich is that which “invades one’s sense of personal, social or cosmic order and security-the feeling of being at home in oneself, one’s society and one’s world” [16] . Beal also discusses the monster being both fascinating and repulsive at the same time.  Beal uses the example of the myth of Dracula, or Orlok, to demonstrate this phenomenon. Orlok is monstrous and terrifying in many ways, yet there is a fascination with him.  Orlok comes from another place, he has animal characteristics, and he comes out only at night. Yet women seem to have a strange almost sexual fascination with this monstrous character.  Beal explains,

Orlok is an image of fascinating and terrifying religious mystery…Orlok is presented as a hierophany of dreadful and fascinating religious otherness, a “wholly other” envoy of the sacred.  The ambiguity of the monster as demonic-divine is accentuated by his relation to Ellen Hutter whose expressions of devotion to her husband Thomas sometimes appear as expressions of devotion to Orlok instead [17] .

The idea of the making the other into a monster and the idea of the monster being both fascinating and repulsive at the same time will be applied to the relationship between Native Americans and Europeans later in this paper.

III. Persecution Texts: The Rhetoric of Extermination

How were these militant acts of extermination against the Plains Indians justified?  The analysis of the rhetoric as persecution texts reveals a way in which murder and military actions are justified to the persecutor and the general population/community.  Many statements made by Europeans to justify their policy on the “Indian Problem” bear the marks of persecution that Girard defines. The rhetoric uses expressions that make the victims monstrous, savages, uncivilized, and inhumane.  The Plains Indians were made monstrous through the language used by Europeans to describe them because they brought the feeling of the unheimlich.  In the report by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs on November 1, 1872, Francis A. Walker wrote about the Plains Indians,

If they stand up against the progress of civilization and industry, they must be relentlessly crushed. The westward course of population is neither to be denied nor delayed for the sake of all Indians that ever called this country their home. They must yield or perish; [18] .

And he also stated that,

With wild men, as with wild beasts, the question whether in a given situation one shall fight, coax, or run, is a question merely of what is easiest and safest [19] .

The language of manifest destiny prevalent through the 19^th century not only was used to justify the spreading of European civilization and Protestantism over the land, but also to justify genocide, violence and slavery. Thomas Jimson wrote,

Wherever they go, this inferior native population, as a result of amalgamation, and that great law of contact between a higher and a lower race, by which the latter gives way to the former, must be gradually supplanted, and its place occupied by this highest of races…. [The United States] will occupy the entire extent of America, the rich and fertile plains of Asia, together with the intermediate isles of the sea, in fulfillment of the great purpose of heaven, of the ultimate enlightenment of the whole earth, and the gradual elevation of man to the dignity and glory of the promised millennial day [20] .

These words place the “other” into the category of inferior and this justifies taking land and culture away simply because it is the divine will of God. The extermination of the Indian is made into a means for the “enlightenment of the entire earth”. Governmental and corporate leaders used the rhetoric of extermination that created binary divisions between “superior” and “inferior” races. This was used to form the desired public response of the eradication of the American Indians.  Lyman Abbott, an outspoken reformer against the Indian reservations, who also justified the right of the European to take the land in America, remarked in 1885,

It is sometimes said that the Indians occupied this country and that we took it away form them. This is not true. The Indians did not occupy this land. A people do not occupy a country simply because they roam over it. They did not occupy the coal mines, nor the gold mines, into which they never struck a pick; nor the rivers which flow into the sea, and on which the music of a mill was never heard. The Indians can scarcely be said to have occupied this country more than the bison and the buffalo they hunted. Three hundred thousand people have no right to hold a continent and keep at bay a race able to people it and provide the happy homes of civilization. We do owe the Indians sacred rights and obligations, but one of those duties is not the right to let them hold forever the land they did not occupy, and which we are not making fruitful for themselves or others [21] .

This rhetoric puts the Native American in the same category as an animal roaming the plains. The language justifies any tactic used to give power and land to the white man in order to further the development of the “civilized” world. The language of Horace Greeley, one of the most influential and well-known newspaper editors, expands upon the idea that the American Indian was not capable of being civilized.

The Indians are children. Their art, wars, treaties, alliances, habitations, crafts, properties, commerce, comforts, all belong to the very lowest and rudest ages of human existence. Some few of the chiefs have a narrow and short-sighted shrewdness, and very rarely in their history, a really great man, like Pontiac or Tecumeseh, has arisen among them; but this does not shake the general truth that they are utterly incompetent to cope in any way with the Europeans or Caucasian race [22] .

Greeley’s words spread into the eyes and ears of the American public and offered justification for exterminating the Native Americans and their culture in order to deal with the “Indian problem”.

“The only good Indian is a dead Indian” became a popular proverbial slogan in the late 1800s. Wolfgang Mieder explained in his work The only Good Indian is a Dead Indian: History and Meaning of a proverbial Stereotype, how this popular slogan became used to justify extermination. He quoted the words of Theodore Roosevelt in a public speech in1886.

I suppose I should be ashamed to say that I take the Western view of the Indian. I don’t go so far as to think that that only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian [23] .          

These words of the later-to-be president reveal rhetoric that, once again, makes the Indian immoral, uncivilized and a target for persecution.  Roosevelt and many other men on the frontier and in the government justified extermination by the thought that only when dead is an Indian worth anything. The Native Americans were made proverbially dead after the Civil War when the United States soldiers pressured the frontier settlers in a ruthless campaign to kill the Native population on the land of the plains. The United States soldiers used this catchy phrase to encourage men to push for and to justify the brutal mass killings of the Native American populations.  The proverb that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” meant both literal death and figurative death. The death was figurative for those who survived the mass killings and were restricted to the reservation life of assimilation into the White culture. To the Native American, to be a “good Indian” did not require physical death, because assimilation into Christianity and the “civilized” lifestyle meant a spiritual and cultural death.

IV. A Sense of Moral Conscience

It is essential to point out a significant aspect of these texts. Although the writings are used to justify the violent actions that took place, they often hold a tinge of sympathy for the victim, or a sense of guilt surrounding their policy towards the Native American. There is a common expression of ambivalence found in the texts that exposes a moral consciousness. Thomas C. Lenord wrote in his article entitled, Red, White, and the Army Blue: empathy and Anger in the American West about the mixture of compassion and anger that men in the army had towards the Indians. He wrote,

Though these men were aware of the ambiguities of their fight for civilization, their sympathies and guilt never swayed them from their duty. I know of no regular Army officer of tender conscience who was provoked to resign his commission [24] .

Although the rhetoric revealed an awareness of the humanity of the American Indian, the policies continued to push towards extermination. Wilcomb E. Washburn reflects upon the rhetoric of the reports of the commissioners of Indian affairs in his introduction of The American Indian and the United States: A Documentary History Vol. I (The audience was primarily the Congress of the United States and the American People). He writes,

Although the reports of the commissioners of Indian affairs consciously represent the official voice of the government in its dealings with the Indians, in fact they frequently express the Indian point of view. Sometimes the view is cited to be refuted or ridiculed. But, as often as not, the Indian point of view is referred to factually or with sympathy… these reports tended to justify official policies, which appear contradictory and wrongheaded when viewed in retrospect [25] .

As Rene Girard explained, naive persecutions can no longer take place because the Christian myth reveals the failure of the scapegoat mechanism, and this is why moral consciousnesses are uncovered. There should no longer be naïve persecutions, yet the Plains Indians were still scapegoated and violently executed. The analysis of the persecution texts shows apprehension of the Europeans towards the actions that they were trying to justify. This acknowledgment of apprehension proves to the persecutor that they realize these victims are in fact human. When the scapegoat mechanism is revealed through the guilt caused by violent mass sacrifice, recognizing the other as human becomes exactly what is used to justify further actions that can allow the continuation of extermination.

V. Alternative Forms of Scapegoating and Justifying Execution

Although the scapegoat mechanism has been revealed by the Christian myth, the scapegoat mechanism is still found in action all over the place.  The Europeans were able to continue exterminating the American Indian precisely because of the presence of markers of consciousness. This consciousness led to strategies of scapegoating and extermination other than collective violent killings. The strategies that were used to cope with the “Indian Problem” apart from militant violence were just other forms of persecution and scapegoating. These strategies were ways to exterminate without the pangs of conscience. In this study I have found five ways that the scapegoat mechanism was implemented against Native Americans in the nineteenth century to further extermination. They are, (1) the military forces, (2) removal, (3) assimilation, (4) buffalo slaughters, and (5) romanticizing the American Indian.   

While the militant actions revealed non- naïve persecutions, removal was another form of extermination that seemed to help suppress guilt.  Removal appeared to be one of the first solutions to the problem of the presence of the Indians in the land that was desired by Europeans. In the 1830s, by law, Indians living in the east were forced to leave their homes east of the Mississippi and move to the West. They established homes along the edge of the Great Plains in what is today Kansas and Oklahoma. The Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and a few of the Seminoles were caught and herded like animals over the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. “As many as 100 people a day died from exhaustion, starvation, and brutality at the hands of the U.S. Army. Of the 50,000 Indians of the several tribes who made the forced march around one half perished” [26] . The whites thought it would be possible to push the Native Americans West, maintaining a division between the two populations. Although the United States Government tried to prove that the removal had gone smoothly for both the Indians and the White, this obviously was not entirely true and is evidenced by the death, suffering and starvation the people experience along the trail of tears. December 1838, President Van Buren announced,

It affords me the sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects. By an agreement concluded with them by the commanding general in that country, their removal has been principally under the conduct of their own chiefs, and they have immigrated without any apparent reluctance [27] .

People in the government tried to tell themselves that the removal had been successful and that both Whites and Indians were content, but this was not the case. A minority of Indians in power who approved the removal policy spoke for the majority who were not content with the policy of the U.S. government. Pushing the American Indian west proved to be a greater problem. Although it seemed like a “peaceful” solution, the Indians were not content, and soon the Frontiersmen and Government were not either because they wanted more land, finding they had not removed the Indians far enough west. After the removal, those in the government focused their efforts on educating and civilizing the Indians, while others pushed for the use of violence to exterminate their presence.

From 1864 to 1870, a huge conflict arose in the government. Congress was pushing to settle the Indian problem by peaceful methods, whereas the Executive Department felt the only solution was by the use of military force. Francis Prucha tells us that the Secretary of the Interior, Jacob Thompson, in 1860 observed that the War Department had superior facilities for controlling and managing “the wild, roving, and turbulent tribes of the interior, who constitute the great majority of the Indians” [28] .

 Governor of Kansas, S.J. Crawford, the chief executive from 1865 to 1868, felt very strongly that the Indian Bureau should be transferred to the War department.  A summary of his Ideas is as follows,

(1) Every effort should be expanded in defending the state from the Indians. (2) Indian uprising should be put down by the use of military force. (3) The wild tribes of Indians should be conquered and driven from the state. (4) Reservation Indians in Eastern Kansas should be transferred from the Interior Department to the War Department. (6) Indian traders and agents should not be allowed to sell arms and ammunition to the Indians [29] .

In contrast to this view prevalent in the Executive Department, was the idea of “peaceful” means of solving the problem of the American Indians in the land the Europeans wanted, and the solution was assimilation.

Assimilation became a justified and non-guilt ridden solution to the “Indian Problem” whereby the Whites accomplished cultural extermination of the Native Americans. Missionary groups tried to “civilize” the Plains Indians with religious and secular education. They also attempted to teach the Indians mechanical and agricultural pursuits [30] .  The Indians were forced to wear European clothing and adapt to the European way of life for survival. The notion of the scapegoat as sacred, mentioned earlier in this paper, worked with assimilation because when the “savage” was transformed into a civilized person, the Indian had then been exterminated. The power to exterminate the different culture confirmed the European ideology. Assimilation, as a form of extermination, was justified because it made the other one of us. Many Europeans felt that “Americanizing” the Indian appeared to be the only solution to placing the Indian on an equal plane with other citizens [31] .  In the 1920s a new reform movement began that was similar to the philosophy found in the 1880s and 1890s.  This movement pushed for the Indians to return to their old ways if they desired to.  Although this was nearly impossible, individualizing the Indian and letting them be “free”, became a solution that rid the European of guilt. But the Indian could not return to the way it had been before. Their land and culture were taken over.  Taylor refers to Francis Prucha as he wrote clearly about Americanizing the individual and assimilation efforts.

The reformers put their faith principally in three proposals: first, to break up tribal relations and their reservation base and to individualize the Indian on a 160 acre homestead…; second, to make the Indians citizens and equal with the whites in regard to both the protection and restraints of law; and third, to provide a universal government school system that would make good Americans out of the rising generation of Indians [32] .

When the Europeans found that putting individual Indians on homesteads was not as efficient as they had hoped, they returned to the idea of the reservation. This was a way to assimilate efficiently. The majority of Plains Indians were driven onto the reservations where they were forced into government schools where Protestantism was taught. The government chose the location and area of the reservations on pieces of land that the European settler did not desire.  The land was basically insufficient for growing crops and raising animals. 

The attitude that came along with assimilation was one that made the assimilators feel good about their actions.  They felt that making the Indian become heimlich was best not only for developing European civilization, but also for the Native American.  Assimilation allowed the scapegoat mechanism to take place with naïve persecution.  The persecutors felt perfectly justified in taking away land, culture, religion, and language and did not see themselves as persecutors in any way, even though they were involved in cultural genocide.

            The extermination of the buffalo was another earlier used form of exterminating the Plains Indians.  Robert A. Trennert Jr. wrote in his book Alternative to Extinction about the effects of the disappearance of the buffalo. He wrote, “Not until the white man began moving on the plains and driving the buffalo away did the tribes find it necessary to launch wars of extermination. Their hunger became a motivation for killing” [33] . When the Indians began to fight in their hunger and rage, the whites persecuted them for being barbarous and like “hungry wolves [34] ”. When the buffalo disappeared, the way of life for the Plains Indians disappeared because the buffalo were essential for sustenance.  The white men moved west slaughtering the buffalo and separating the herds. The hunters took the skins, and left the rest of the body including the meat to rot on the Plains. Fortunately for the settler, by killing the buffalo to near extinction, the Indians could not survive without turning towards the white means form of sustenance, such as agriculture.

            Ironically, the fifth way that the extermination of Plains Indians was justified was by romanticizing the “other”. After extermination by mass killings and extermination of culture through assimilation, romanticizing the Indian was the final step of exterminating “real” culture and a way of covering up the truly violent past through another myth.  The image of the American Indian was flipped from the barbarous savage into a fascinating hero.  Characters of Indians in popular literature, movies and television began to romanticize the Indian that had formerly been demonized. Stereotypes of women as seductive and men as virile became a way of making the other both intriguing and monstrous. The real Indians disappeared under the myths of romanticization.

            Buffalo Bill Cody (William F. Cody, 1846-1917) is a perfect example of someone whose career represents the shift in the scapegoat strategy of exterminating the Plains Indians.   In his earlier career he was on the plains as a trapper, a bullwhacker, and a Civil War Soldier.  He supplied buffalo meat for the Kansas Pacific Railroad Workers, killing off many buffalo. After being employed by the United States Army for a number of years, in 1872 he had his first appearance on the stage with “Scouts of the Prairie ”.  He went on to have the leading role in the “Wild West Show”, where the Plains Indians were romanticized as men roaming the plains surrounded by buffalo. The Show was supposed to depict the “real west” and the “real Indian”. Cody successfully celebrated in a acting carrier, what he had previously killed.

            Romanticizing the Indian as a solution to finding a way for extermination without guilt is in great contrast to the other ways of justifying extermination, that were made by creating categories as Nancy Jay described between A and Not-A [35] . The distinction between A and Not-A was a way of maintaining the status quo by excluding everything that was Not-A.  In the case of romanticizing the Indian, the lines between A and Not-A were blurred.  Romanticizing the American Indian made what was Not-A into A. This made the Native American exotic, yet still in the domain of imagination. Girard says that blurring lines of differentiation causes a crisis, but in this case, blurring the lines was exactly what created a solution.  This advance on Girard proves that blurring the lines of differentiation can create a resolution to a crisis. The swaying of the mind through romanticizing the Native American was a way to create a new myth that concealed a real act of violence. After exterminating the real thing we created a romanticized idea of the Indian life. The fantasy became a justification because we created an idea of the Indian for ourselves as free and glorified people. It looks as if there is hope that with “luck”, the Indians too, will adapt this mythical image as real past.

VI. Conclusion

The rhetoric used to justify the extermination of the Plains Indians in the 19^th century reveals the use of the scapegoat mechanism in response to the internal crisis in our country for land and for dealing with racism.  The scapegoat mechanism is used to justify violent acts of sacrificing a victim. But I have found that extermination and the scapegoat mechanism are not only found in the collective murders against the Plains Indians, but more so in the extermination through assimilation and the creation of new myths about the “other”. This was action removed from physical murder. The scapegoat mechanism is more sinister than it appears because there are multiple alternatives for getting rid of “the other” such as by making the other more “civilized”, as in the case of assimilation.

The scapegoat mechanism doesn’t have to rest on an act of collective murder. The development of the more obscure strategies of extermination, are necessary for the continuation of the scapegoat mechanism because persecutions are no longer naïve. These different ways of scapegoating explain why the scapegoat mechanism continues to occur all over today. The rhetoric that was used to justify the annihilation of the Plains Indians is just one example among many of the power that rhetoric holds to enable the scapegoat mechanism. Thus, we need to be both critical and skeptical of language because it often could be a persecution text that triggers the scapegoat mechanism. It is also important to recognize alternative forms of victimization because this can reveal the scapegoat mechanism at work once again, and this recognition might be a way to stop the cycle of the continuing scapegoat mechanism.

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