Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state’s willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land. This trend of extermination became common in the twentieth century as the United States seized military and economic control of the world, capping five hundred years of European colonialism and imperialism.3 The canny Prussian Otto von Bismarck, founder and first chancellor (1871–90) of the German empire, was prescient in observing, “The colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the modern world.”4 Jefferson was its architect. Andrew Jackson was the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' Hist…, loc. 218744