Summary: The clearing of Native Americans from their land was not a single event but a policy carried out over centuries, as European settlers pushed west from the East coast, first under British rule and then under the independent United States. In this essay, Unbekoming argues that Washington and the fur trade used a toolkit of chemical weapons: slow poisoning through the frontier whiskey trade and, he says, a government vaccination programme that became compulsory once Native peoples were confined to reservations. He takes the Mandan catastrophe of 1837 on the upper Missouri as his case, and takes on S.C. Gwynne, the Pulitzer-finalist historian of the Comanches, a Western historian who disposes of the Mandan in a single clause about smallpox carried by the Kiowas. The abstract phrase “white man’s disease”, the author argues, lets historians describe a catastrophe without naming anyone responsible.

Why it matters: The disappearance and forced removal of Native peoples under European colonialism is among the most important chapters of world history, and it is rarely studied or understood in the other parts of the world that also suffered colonial rule. Bharat was colonised too, but it largely escaped physical erasure: it was a civilisation too vast and too deeply rooted to be cleared away, and its people kept up their resistance across generations. The Native peoples of the Americas fought with the same courage, often for centuries, but against settlers who had come to take the land itself. Their story is a warning and a shared cause: the same supremacist, universalist forces were at work, only the odds differed.

“White Man’s Disease” — Unbekoming, 8 Nov 2026

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