The concept of genocide and settler colonialism in North America

This is a good article by Jeffrey Ostler, a historian who seriously researches  American Indian policy in the context of genocide studies: Ostler, Jeffrey, Trump thinks Andrew Jackson’s statue is a great monument — but to what? Washington Post 06/24/2020

He does an impressive job here of identifying some of the issues without dumbing it down. It's a lot more complicated than a lot of people may assume - and of course it's always a downer subject. Ostler has a recent book called Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas that, despite the title, really digs into the weeds of how challenging it can be to apply the current international law concept of genocide to the 19th century or earlier. In this case, applying it to the case of settler colonialism, which pretty much characterized the entire European colonial project in all of North and South America over centuries.

Identifying genocide in history

Genocide studies can be a minefield. As one example from serious work on the topic of the Holocaust would be the very different views of the "Jewish Councils" (Jüdenräte) taken by Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, and Lucy Dawidowicz.

And ideological hacks of various kinds are happy to muddy the waters where they can. Of course.

When it comes to the question of settler colonialism and genocide, the actual field, as Ostler's book shows in detail, has some genuinely tangled question. In the case of European colonialism in the Americas, one huge question is the actual number of native inhabitants in the late 15th century, when Columbus famously "discovered" America. There is no real question that European diseases spread to the Americas with deadly consequences. But exactly how deadly they were depends on how many people were there in "precolumbian" times. If the higher estimates are accurate, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that European germs and viruses (although no one knew what either was at the time!) had by far the most devastating effect on native societies, both in terms of the number killed and in terms of the crippling devastation to social organization that such a massive, rapid number of deaths would imply.

And that's an empirical, factual question, not just a matter of historical interpretation.

Genocide as now defined in international law is not a war crime but a distinct crime, and even deliberate mass cruelty with deadly consequenes does not meet the genocide definition. The UN's 1948 Genocide Convention does not include the targeting of a political minority or even a social class of people for death. The notorious mass killing of Communists (real and alleged) by the Suharto regime in Indonesia after his 1965 coup, to take only one example among far too many, does not fall under the definition of genocide.

The international law specialist Raphaël Lemkin, who is credited with coining the word "genocide", included the concept of "cultural genocide", which is a familiar concept for the contemporary left, in his definition. But the UN Genocide Convention does not.

And like other crimes, genocide is also defined by intent. In American criminal law, killing someone by reckless driving is defined as a different crime than deliberately targeting someone and running them down with a car, although the victim is just as dead in both cases. Ostler mention the role of intent and how to establish it with genocide in the Post column.

So, in the case of settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, the role of disease matters but also whether the colonists had the intent to spread diseases with the goal of killing off native populations.

So, for serious history, there are important and difficult issues in applying the concept of genocide to settler colonial situations, which includes the treatment of native peoples in the Americas by European colonialists and their predominately white descendants. And not only in the Americas. Historians, for instance, also discuss whether cases like the war against the Hereros by Imperial Germany in their German South West Africa colony, now Namibia. (See: Germany regrets Namibia 'genocide' BBC News 01/12/2004.

American Indians in far-right American propaganda

Lots of white Americans tend to code anything they perceived ethnic-pride movements as "left."

And in the world of small political sectarian groups, there are a lot of weird variations. And there is a strain of far-right ideology that celebrates a romanticized image of the native inhabitants of North America as primordial Americans, extending to the weird schtick of a kind of American Indian Nazism. If that sounds bizarrely eccentric, that's because it is. Like so much on the far right.

Why do I bring that up in this context? Because part of the Holocaust-denier strategy is to minimize, "relativize", and distract from the Holocaust carried out by the German Nazis. And similar arguments can be tempting for ethnic-nationalist movements.

Dave Neiwert wrote 15 years ago about the weird nexus of some American Indians with the far right in The Succubus Orcinus 03/23/2005.

Around that same time, Republican were foaming at the mouth over Ward Churchill, a Native American scholar who had said something they took to be sacrilegious about the 9/11 attacks. When I dug into Churchill's background a bit, it became obvious that he had a quirky, ethnic-nationalist argument and argued at least in part in the language of Holocaust deniers:

• Chuckie Watch 85: Ole Chuckie shore is smarter than them professers 02/01/2005
• What have the Republicans done for us lately? 02/10/2005
• More on Ward Churchill, who's already gotten way more attention than he deserved 04/11/2005

I revisited him four years later. (Remember Ward Churchill? 04/12/2009)

Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons wrote about far-right use of American Indian imagery in Right-wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (2000):

Nazi cultural pluralism took an added twist when Hitler's government declared that American Indians were members of the Aryan race. The Bund made serious (but virtually fruitless) efforts to recruit Indians as members. In 1937,  [far-right leader William Dudley] Pelley, calling himself "Chief Pelley of the Tribe of Silver," promised American Indians that he would free them from reservations and place Jews in reservations instead. The emblem of the tiny American National-Socialist Party was "an American Indian, arm outstretched in salute, poised against a black swastika." These moves combined White Americans' traditional parasitic use of the American Indian as political symbol. as in the Boston Tea Party, with German Nazism's romanticist cult of nature and of "savagery" as the antithesis of corrupt Jewish civilization. (Hitler was an avid fan of Karl May's novels, in which noble Indians figured prominently.) U.S. fascist groups also made common cause with the right-wing American Indian Federation (AIF) against the Roosevelt administration's 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which replaced naked colonialism with more sophisticated federal control through elected tribal governments. The AIF, which advocated full assimilation of Americans Indians into White society, opposed the 1934 act as communistic. [my emphasis]

Allison Schottenstein writes in Could It Happen in America? The Rise and Fall of Fritz Kuhn’s German-American Bund Pop Matters 09 Dec 2014

The most unexpected aspect of the book is Bernstein’s revelation that there was a connection between the American Indian Federation and the German-American Bund. This is particularly surprising, considering that Native Americans would never fit the Aryan ideal. But Bernstein explores the ways that AIF embraced and perpetuated anti-Semitism within the organization. Bernstein provides the example of the American Nation Conference in Asheville, where AIF activist Alice Lee Jemision and anti-Semitic leader of the Silver Legion, William Dudley Pelley, shared a stage and “Native Americans sporting swastika armbands worked the audience, handing out pro-Nazi pamphlets” (97). As Bernstein observes, “Native Americans, while not viewed as racially pure, were a unique market for Bundist manipulation” (98). What does this peculiar relationship tell us about race, ethnicity, and the position of Native Americans in the United States in the '30s?

Knute Berger looks at Nazi use of the Noble Savage concept in The strange case of the Northwest's Native American Nazi Cross Cut 12/15/2016:

The image of the “noble savage” embodied by Sioux warriors was embedded in Nazi cultural studies — they admired their “warrior” culture, and Hitler’s fascination with the Western novels of Karl May was well known. The Nazis even declared the Sioux to be Aryan — thus American Indians were acceptable in the Nazi’s tent. The Bund touted its connections with Native Americans, noting the swastika was an ancient native symbol, and running editorials in their publications claiming a role as “wards” of the American Indians to protect them from “anti-Christian Communism.”

Karen Goodluck also reports on Nazi use of American Indians in propaganda ( Far-right extremists appropriate Indigenous struggles for violent ends High Country News 08/27/2019):

Before and during World War II, Nazi propaganda declared American cultural imperialism a threat to German culture, noting that it had destroyed the Native American way of life and comparing U.S. bombing campaigns in German cities to American frontier massacres. Usbeck calls this “co-victimization” — an invented affinity with the Native American experience of genocide and cultural loss, rhetorically linked to ideas of German victimhood. The Nazis thereby used Indigenous people to create a myth of survival, of a people fighting heroically for their homeland.

Bottom line: don't fall into the trap of thinking it's easy to apply the concept of genocide to countries like the United States with a settler-colonial past. And there are lots of ideological booby traps on the way to thinking it through.

Post-Thanksgiving thoughts on processing historical wrongs

Thanksgiving is over, having brought with it some inevitable reflections on the history of the holiday and the role that the native Indian population played in history since then.

One notable entry in that annual set of reflections was by Philip Deloria, The Invention of Thanksgiving New Yorker 11/18/2019. Definitely worth a read for anyone trying to take the history seriously.

My own general perspective on American history is to valorize the people and political/social trends that led to the establishment and further development of democracy, equality, and human rights.

But history should be contested. On the professional level, if historians never challenged established assumptions, they would be doing a lousy job.

The historian Robert Remini (1921–2013) is best known for his three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson, whose image Donald Trump has appropriated for his white nationalism movement, though assuredly with Trump having no idea about the politics of Jackson's day and no interest in it. Although Jackson was long honored as a founder of the Democratic Party along with Thomas Jefferson, Democrats and the left generally have essentially bought in to the right's use of Jackson symbolism.

This is another way in which history is contested. Since conservatism if particularly associated with an idealized past, political appropriation of images from the past comes more easily to Republicans than Democrats. Which is politically problematic, because American voters generally cherish an idealized version of the past. It's also frankly lazy on the part of the left and center-left.

The need for good academic history, the need for a focus on important trends good and bad, the reality that historical symbolism becomes part of contemporary political polemics and campaign marketing - these are different things but are nevertheless connected. And often hard to cleanly distinguish from each other.

Remini did an additional book on Jackson beyond his trilogy, in which he focused on Old Hickory's Indian policies, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). In the Preface, Remini writes, referring in the first sentence quoted here to Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor:

As a result of this climate of fear and mistrust [against Japanese-American citizens], the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt ruthlessly rounded up and removed Japanese-Americans from their homes in California and interned them in concentration camps away from the coast in order to bolster the defense of the country in case of a Japanese invasion. But these people were not foreign enemies. They were American citizens who were denied their basic civil rights as well as their property because of the nation's perceived need and fear.

We today must remember that in the past a great many normally decent and upright Americans have repeatedly mistreated other people: Native Americans, African-Americans, and Japanese-Americans. And invariably those actions were justified under the rubric of national security or economic need or both. Moreover, this did not happen in some bygone era among unenlightened people. The present generation - the so-called greatest generation - let it happen to their fellow citizens. So before anyone today assumes a high moral tone about what happened a century ago, let that person take a long view of American history and remember that fear and mistrust at any time can and probably will lead to despicable crimes that disgrace the nation and blacken its history.

I read Remini's statement there as a straightforward expression of the dilemma of an honest historian engaged with the problem of how to deal with evil in history, keeping in mind that understanding the dark actions of the past is not the same as justifying them. And explaining how bad, even horrible events took place is not the same as making excuses for them.

I'll also mention, in line with what I take to be his main point here, that 100 years from now, a lot of people will very likely look back at those of us who have been around for the last several decades and criticize us collectively for our unbelievable lack of a responsible attitude on climate change. And they won't be wrong to do so, although some will understand what they are talking about better than others. All of this assumes, of course, that our collective irresponsibility about nuclear arms proliferation doesn't compound the climate crisis by orders of magnitude.

Remini, himself a US veteran of the Second World War, invokes the internment of Japanese-Americans in a way that addresses the third use of history listed above, evoking the images and ideals of the past in service of present-day political concerns. Today liberals and most everyone farther left have no trouble paying tribute (however reluctantly in the case of corporate Democrats) to Roosevelt's New Deal, even while acknowledging straightforwardly that the Japanese-American internment was wrong and that the New Deal made shameful concessions to segregation. But the concept of a Green New Deal is something the left invokes in the US and Europe as a way to validate a new idea by connecting it to the image of a progressive period in the past.

It's also the case that the Republicans are happy to remind people of the heinousness of the Second World War internment as a criticism of the Democrats. At the same time they justify the vicious policies of the Trump Administration kidnapping newborn babies from refugees in Trump's border concentration camps. And the further in the past an incident inevitably becomes, the easier it is to make cheap propaganda points out of them. There are plenty of people still alive who weren't necessarily around during the Second World War who remember that Earl Warren, the liberal Republican who became a bogeyman to conservatives of both parties as Chief Justice of the "Warren Court", was Governor of California at the time and was one of the most influential politicians pushing for the internment. Bipartisanship in action!

But nobody alive remembers from their own experiences in real time what any of the political leaders of the 19th century were doing before or after the Civil War in the US. So when Republican propagandists try to identify racist attitudes of the Democratic Party of that time as the same on race as the Democratic Party of 2019, they are invoking a historical legacy that is not well known by American voters today and understood even less. Political junkies who follow daily developments in politics are normally not immediately current on the politics of even major events prior to the Civil War, like the Missouri Compromise or the Nullification Controversy.

And the Republican crowds who howl in rage during Trump's Nuremburg rallies don't care in the least about what actually happened in the 19th century, however fired up they may get about tribal white nationalist symbols like statues of the traitor Robert E. Lee.

When it comes to trying to understand history in terms of political theory for the present or in formulating some theory of history, Remini's reflections quoted above are very relevant. The folksinger Kate Campbell who has a sharp sense for the messiness of historical conflicts combined with an intense appreciation of the need to fight historical wrongs, has a song called "Signs Following," which her fans often call the Snake Song. It's about the real case of a snake-handling Pentacostal minister in Alabama who tried to murder his wife by holding her arm in a rattlesnake cage where she got bitten. The closing lines of the song are:

But somewhere on Sand Mountain a woman needs no proof
That evil can lie so close to truth

It's that very thing that makes history so frustrating for anyone who would like to believe that "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” the Martin Luther King, Jr., quote that Barack Obama liked to use. Mychal Denzel Smith offered a caution about a lazy historical determinism in connection with that notion in The Truth About ‘The Arc Of The Moral Universe’ Huffpost 01/18/2018:

The dawn of the age of President Donald Trump has restored to that quote some of the meaning lost in Obama’s repeated use. We say it to ourselves now because we need to believe, even as all visible signs of progress are eroded, that the world we seek lies waiting for us, just on the other side of this hellscape. It is not going to show up tomorrow, but knowing that it will show up someday should help fortify us for the fight ahead.

This use of the quotation, though, carries the risk of magical thinking. After all, if the arc of the moral universe will inevitably bend toward justice, then there is no reason for us to work toward that justice, as it’s preordained. If it is only a matter of cosmic influence, if there is no human role, then we are off the hook. This isn’t how King meant it, as evidenced by the work to which he dedicated his own life.

My understanding of the moral importance of realistically dealing with the past is draws heavily from two sources. One is my experience and understanding of segregation and desegregation from growing up in Mississippi. I have a black-and-white photo hanging on my wall at home. It's a picture from 1960 or 1961 of the first through sixth grade classes in the small town where I grew up. I was in the second grade, and visitors have fun trying to figure out which little boy was me. (The ears are the giveaway.) It's a picture that I really like and associate with fond memories. I'm still in contact with some of the people in the photo.

It's a photo that has only white kids in it. The town where I grew up had a majority black population. Robert Kennedy's Justice Department showed in federal court that none of the black citizens in the county was registered to vote, due to segregationist voter suppression. The black kids had their own school. That's how it was in Mississippi. It was a terrible system, and it was just plain wrong. At some level, all the white people knew it was wrong. But they pertetuated it anyway. So that photo tells a story in what it shows, and what it does not show. The history of those kids in the photo can't actually be understood meaningfully outside the context of what is missing.

Or, to use a far better-known example, the slaveowner, radical Democrat (for white men with property), and later President James Madison, famously wrote, "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary." (Federalist Papers #51) The people who developed the principles by which we now judge the actions of the past as evil were deeply flawed human beings. But some fought to make the world better, more humane, more democratic, even when they were also doing things that were bad or destructive. If we take understanding history seriously, we have to be able to distinguish between those who were pioneers for humane principles, those who were later convinced of what the pioneers were advocating, and those who consciously did things that were evil by the standards which they themselves professed.

The second major source of my understanding of drawing moral conclusions and lessons from history came from learning about and engaging with the German and Austrian struggles over how to understand the Holocaust. That was not a case of how "evil can lie so close to truth." That was a case of people doing something that they knew was unquestionably wrong by the standards and laws of their time. "Truth" wasn't anywhere close by.

But the "working through" (Aufarbeitung) that past was and is a complicated matter. One of the complications is the swamp-dwellers' ideology of Holocaust denial. People who have made an effort to understand that dark corner of the world of politics and history have had some encounter with how the Holocaust deniers try to use a form of "whataboutism" to justify the mass murders of the Holocaust or to deflect consideration of it. The Allied bombing of Dresden became a favorite topic for that kind of argument. Look, the Allies were trying to commit genocide against the Germans, so they retaliated by murdering Jews, the argument goes. In the Historikerstreit controversy of the late 1980s, the argument that Hitler got the idea of concentration camps and the Holocaust from Stalin and therefore the Rooskies were really to blame for the Holocaust was seriously advocated by people not physically brain-damaged.

So, when we are talking about the evils of the past like the fate of the native populations in the Western Hemisphere, it's important to get the story right so far as possible. And, for me, that means not promoting some simplistic, feel-good history about the benevolent mission of the white settlers in the Americas. It means being critical toward the prominent narrative that treats the history of white Americans and the native populations as a tragedy, a blind fate playing out against the will of the actors. I don't think that narrative is entirely wrong because I've never been able to envision what a Happy Ending to that story could have looked like. But it's far from the whole story.

It also means being careful not to create a superficial, moralistic narrative of a monstrous, intentional genocide that could too easily lend itself to a Holocaust-denier type of whataboutism. Or one that pictures the native peoples as idyllic peaceful communities living in harmony with nature, a romantic notion that is also deeply rooted in a flawed historical narrative that is a kind of mirror-image version of the Indians-as-murderous-savages notion.

Here is a useful and thought-provoking piece from before Thanksgiving 2018, which notes that the tendency to erase Indians from much of the telling of American history not only serves to ignore the general brutality and catastrophic effects of the US version of settler colonialism on the aboriginal population. It can also obscure the history of the Indians' own agency in dealing with the Americans: Colin Calloway, George Washington Lived in an Indian World, But His Biographies Have Erased Native People Longreads 11/07/2018.

Andrew Jackson, an Indian war, an adopted war orphan, and how strange the combination of history and political symbolism can be

This is another in my occasional posts about my reservations on what I see as dogmatic and misguided treatments of early American and antebellum history.
(A German version of this post is here.)

This occurs in both popular and academic history. But the bizarrely effective cooptation of the image of Andrew Jackson by Donald Trump and his popular mob of followers has had a grim effect on portraits of the seventh President and his era. Since Jackson's movement and the larger context of what came to be known as Jacksonian democracy involved an expansion of democratic rights and challenged the influence of organized money and the concentration of wealth and power, it really is a sad (and bitter) historical irony that the most crassly oligarchic President in history has successfully identified himself with Jacksonian imagery.

For a recent example among very many illustrations of the current state of oligarchical rule in the US, see: Graham Rapier, Ivanka Trump made nearly $4 million from the President's DC hotel last year Business Insider 06/15/2019. Even if you think of Andrew Jackson as a comic-book villain, Trumpism is about as un-Jacksonian as it gets. (And if you think Jackson is a bigger villain than his arch-enemy John Calhoun, I'm sorry, you're just beyond the pale.)

Washington Post writer Michael Rosenwald discusses Jackson in Andrew Jackson slaughtered Indians. Then he adopted a baby boy he’d orphaned. 06/16/2019.

Not least because the Democratic Party makes no effort to defend its own historical party symbolism - Jackson is one of the founders of the party - centrist and left commentators are quick to condemn him as a perpetrator of genocide against Indians. This is a relatively recent development. "Jefferson-Jackson Dinners" were traditional fundraising events for the Democratic Party. Jarrett Stepman used the occasion of Louisiana Democrats changing the name of those events - in 2017 - to talk about both Jackson and Jefferson as party founders. (Why Are Democrats Purging the Memory of Jefferson and Jackson? Newsweek 07/20/2017)

The point of Rosenwald's article is to debunk the notion that there might be anything constructive or decent or even ambiguous in Jackson adopting an Indian orphan child:

During the War of 1812, roughly two decades before he became president, Gen. Andrew Jackson wrote home to his wife, Rachel, from the battlefield.

Though he was tired and banged up, Jackson was also proud. He had just presided over another successful slaughter of Native Americans.

“I detached Genl John Coffee with part of his Brigade of Cavalry and mounted men to destroy Creek Town,” he wrote, referring to an area in what is now Alabama.

The general, Jackson wrote, had performed this slaughter in “elegant” style. More than 170 Native Americans were killed. Still, there was more killing to do. He was determined to march on, he wrote, to “the heart of the creek nation.” ...

“I send on a little Indian boy,” he wrote.

The baby boy’s family had been wiped out. Jackson arranged for him to be transported to his plantation, the Hermitage, where he would grow up as Rachel and the future president’s adopted child.

I wouldn't necessarily take issue with Rosenwald's criticisms of how the story has been given a sentimental spin. But his historical framing leaves out some important features.

I don't assume the writers at WaPo compose own their headlines. But I doubt most readers would notice any difference between the title and the text. Noting that Jackson is "called genocidal by some critics," he writes, "Now Jackson was taking in this baby whose parents had been killed by his own orders."

Jackson biographer Robert Remini describes this event in Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). It was an episode in the Creek War of 1813-1814. This was one moment in a centuries-long process of European powers and the United States of taking control of the North American continent. But in the moment it occurred, the James Madison Administration was in power, the US had acquired the Louisiana Purchase and so had territory extending to the Mississippi River, and was in the middle of a war against an invading Britain. Florida was still Spanish territory and Britain was operating a naval base in Pensacola. There were various Indian tribes and clans and factions in the southeastern part of the continent. Their alliances and rivalries with each other and with the US government and various American settlements were constantly shifting.

From the American/Madison Administration point of view, the initiating event in the Creek War came in 1812:

... Little Warrior, leading a party of Creeks who were returning from a visit to the Shawnees on the northern lakes, "massacred" several families living near Duck River on May 12, 1812. They took Martha Crawley captive and "murdered" two of her children, who were playing in the yard. Martha's husband was away at the time, and she managed to hide her two youngest children in a potato cellar under the floor of her home. The Indians broke open the door and dragged Martha outside with the intention of killing her but decided instead to hold her captive. They forced her to cook for them as they headed for Tuckabatchee but committed "no other violence" on her.

Remini does not paint a pretty picture of the military encounter in which the baby was orphaned and in which the legendary David Crockett participated:

[Jackson] and his army were now about thirteen miles to the east of the hostile [Creek] village of Tallushatchee. On November 3, 1813, General Coffee's brigade surrounded Tallushatchee and systematically slaughtered most of the warriors. It was a quick and bloody operation. "We shot them like dogs," boasted Davy Crockett. The killing was so gruesome that Lieutenant Richard Keith Call became nauseated. "We found as many as eight or ten dead bodies in a single cabin," he declared. "Some of the cabins had taken fire, and half consumed human bodies were seen amidst the smoking ruins. In other instances dogs had torn and feasted on the mangled bodies of their masters. Heart sick I turned from the revolting scene." The town was then burned to the ground.

The Americans lost five men and forty-one wounded in the attack; some 186 [Creek] Red Sticks were found dead. In this war of unspeakable barbarity only the lives of women and children were spared, but eighty-four women and children were taken as captives in this encounter. "We have retaliated for the destruction of Fort Mims," reported the jubilant General Jackson to Governor Blount.

While inspecting the bloody battleground, soldiers came upon a dead Indian woman still clutching her living ten-month-old male infant. The child was the sole survivor of his family. Some Indian women "wanted to k[ill him] because the whole race & family of his [blood] was destroyed," reported Jackson. But, in an unprecedented act of mercy that not all militiamen approved, one of the interpreters, possibly James Quarles, intervened and lifted the child from the hands of his dead mother. He carried the infant to the commanding general. When Jackson was told that the other Indians wished to kill the infant, he immediately overruled them. Suddenly, he said, he experienced a deep feeling for the boy. "In fact when I reflect that he as to his relations is so much like myself I feel an unusual sympathy for him." [my emphasis]

This account presents a different picture than the WaPo's. Specifically, according to Remini:

• The American soldiers under Jackson's command killed all the adult males in the village.
• The women and children were specifically not targeted for killing.
• There is no indication that both the baby's "parents had been killed by his [Jackson's] own orders", as Rosenwald claims, although the baby's father was presumably among the dead.
• One of the interpreters in Jackson's command rescued the baby from being killed by female Indian survivors of the attack.
• Jackson made a specific decision to spare the baby, who he had good reason to believe would be put to death by the surviving members of the Indian group.

This is why I use the name "Contradicciones" for this blog. History is complicated and the "lessons of history" don't fit very well onto a bumper sticker. And letting historical analysis be driven by momentary and superficial political marketing fads isn't something I can recommend.

What is the difference between these accounts?

One very obvious difference between those two accounts dealing with the same event is that one is a newspaper column, the other an academic history. Different methods, different types of story-telling, different audiences.

The two accounts also focus on different narratives around the same historical event. Rosenwald's column appears to rely on a metanarrative that the displacement of the native population was a horrible, destructive, morally reprehensible process. That's a "fundamental" criticism pointing to a basic societal, even civilizational fault. And there is wide agreement on that metanarrative, although you don't have to push Trumpists very hard to get to an assumption that European expansion in the Americas was a basically benevolent, civilizing historical blessing. But a position of "fundamental" criticism is not a product of recent decades. The Dominican missionary priest Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) turned against Spanish policy in the Americas and published criticisms of the policy aiming at "the exposure of the 'sin' of domination, oppression, and injustice that the European was inflicting upon the newly discovered peoples. It was Las Casas’s intention to reveal to Spain the reason for the misfortune that would inevitably befall it when it became the object of God’s punishment..." (Enrique Dussel, Las Casas, Bartolomé de Britannica Online; accessed 06/18/2019)

Remini, on the other hand, is providing an academic, empirical account of a particular moment in a particular place during the centuries-long process of conquest that De Las Casas (sensibly) describes as a "sin" from a Christian religious perspective. And, as is often the case in such empirical accounts, it includes a lot of features that are messy in the sense that they do not fit comfortably into a broader, sweeping, fundamental critical perspective. In other words, "it's sin and I'm agin' it" can be a valid and useful perspective. But the actual situation described by Remini presents more concrete decisions and more specific questions. Were the Americans violating existing law by executing all the adult males in the village? How did that compare to contemporary practices including Indian military practices? Were there practical alternatives to the murder of the Crawley children and taking the mother prisoner? War es akzeptiert under den Creek-Indianern, ganze Familien einschließlich Kinder in dieser Situation zu ermorden?Was it a common and excepted practice among the Creeks to put to death small babies who were orphaned in such circumstances? Were there laws providing guidance on how US soldiers should respond in that situation? Was the interpreter right or wrong to save the baby? Was Jackson acting rightly and legally in adopting the baby by the laws and moral standards of that time and place?

A third way to look at the difference between the two accounts is that Rosenwald is using current political symbolism in which Jackson is (however weirdly!) widely seen as a mascot for Trumpism. And he uses that symbolism to make a symbolic, polemical, contemporary criticism of the racial blind spots of the Trump base. Although Remini presumably was taking account of the context of the historiographic work at the time he was writing, his account is not focused on making an immediate political point. And obviously in a 2001 work, he wasn't addressing the momentary political imagery of 2019. Eighteen years ago, there was no general identification of Andrew Jackson symbolism and Republican racial politics. Although the conservative scholar Walter Russell Mead was already promoting the idea of "Jacksonian" politics as militant militarism. (E.g., The Jacksonian Tradition And American Foreign Policy The National Interest Winter 1999/2000) That was an is still a weird notion. But I assume that was part of whatever mix of propaganda and bad history got us to the point where Jackson has become a symbol for Donald Trump.