Was the Colonization of North America a Genocidal Project? David Silverman on the Tragic Fate of Native Americans

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. It is July the 2nd, 2026 Couple of days to July 4th, America's 250th birthday. Although recently on the show, America hasn't been getting a great press. Couple of days ago, we had Christopher Hooks on the show. His article in Harper's This Month, Happy Fucking Birthday, America, was on the cover of the magazine, suggesting that America is now exhausted. We also did a show with the Paris-based journalist, Madeleine Schwartz. She has an edited new book out, How We See It. The world looks at America in the age of Trump, and America doesn't seem, at least according to Schwartz and her fellow writers, get a very good look. And I'm wondering whether America's bad luck, if that's the right word to use to describe all this, will continue with today's guest, David Silverman. He's a professor of early American and Native American history at George Washington University. He's the author of one book, This Land Is Their Land. And his new book is called The Chosen and the Damned, Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States. David is joining us from a very steamy Washington, DC. David, congratulations on the new book.
Are we going to have another 30 or 40 minutes of bashing America in this conversation?

**David J. Silverman** (2:04)
I don't think America comes off looking all that great in the book that I just wrote, though I will say there's some redemption towards the end of the story.

**Andrew Keen** (2:17)
No, that's good. I look forward to the redemption. I have to admit I'm getting a little tired of the America bashing. So let's begin with the bad news, David. It's a pretty miserable story of American treatment of Native Americans, isn't it?

**David J. Silverman** (2:32)
It is that. I'm contending in this book that a structural genocide took place over the course of centuries, which is to say that white Americans and their colonial forebears so diminished their valuation of Native people that they treated indigenous people's lives as expendable, and thus wasted away those lives over the course of centuries, constituting again what I consider to be a structural genocide. I'm also contending that that structural genocide both fed and was fed by a racial ideology of white supremacism and Native American degradation.

**Andrew Keen** (3:31)
David, we did a show recently, I was actually in Warsaw with an expert on the Holocaust, who defined genocide. You talk about something called structural genocide. What do you mean by that?

**David J. Silverman** (3:48)
Right. The genocide I'm talking about is not a top-down government-directed campaign to exterminate Native people. Though, let's be perfectly clear, there are moments across the centuries in which the government did decide that certain groups of Native people should be exterminated for their resistance to American rule. What I'm describing is actually a society-wide, a culture-wide indifference to Native American life that was based on an ideology of race in which white Americans considered themselves to be chosen by God to possess the continent and lord it over others, and in which they saw Native people as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction in the name of white American progress.
That ideology coupled with the white American imperative to seize Native American land led white Americans from the 17th century well into the 20th century to destroy Native American life through dozens of different forms. That's what I mean when I'm talking about structural genocide.

**Andrew Keen** (5:14)
How does it compare in terms of these relative genocides with the behavior of the Spanish and Latin America and Mexico in Peru?

**David J. Silverman** (5:22)
Right. So there's a difference there.
The violence of Spanish colonialism in Central and South America and in the Caribbean was quick and horrific to be sure.
Just incredible spasms of violence in the interest of subjugating Native people. But the purpose of Spanish colonialism was not to wipe out Native people and it wasn't to seize Native American land, at least not in totality. The purpose was to subjugate the Native American population and to have them subservient to Spanish rule. So once the Spanish had defeated Native people, they took their foot off the gas, so to speak, and kept the surviving Native American population around as tributaries. That was not the purpose of Anglo Americans during the colonial period or the United States that succeeded English America. The purpose of those societies was to seize Native American land and remove the Native people on it. And when they met Native American resistance to that agenda, their first order of business was to exterminate those Native people in resistance.