America’s other civil war

‘What makes the Red Man red?’ the Lost Boys asked in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). According to Sammy Cahn’s lyric, it was embarrassment: ‘The very first Injun prince/ He kissed a maid and start to blush.’

Redness is everywhere in The Earth is Weeping — in the anger of the Indians, harried and starved into fatal resistance; in the shame of the whites, with their fork-tongued treaties and heavy weapons; and in the blood, Indian and white, that flows on almost every page of Peter Cozzens’s sweeping, expert and appalling account of the murder of America’s Indians.

Every nation has its founding sin. America, the land of plenty, has two. Cozzens’s story begins in the 1860s, with the expiation of slavery and the refounding of the United States, but the commission of murder was already well advanced. In the early decades of European settlement, disease and war had reduced the Indians of the north east.