Description: How colonial conquest was driven by state-sponsored, profit-driven campaigns of corporeal mutilation of Indian peoples in the Americas
Review Quotes: "A much-needed continental account of how settler colonialism culminated in state-sanctioned bounties to kill and dismember Native people as a part of a larger process of eliminating them. . . . It is a history that must continue to be reckoned with--in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere."--Paul Conrad, H-Net Reviews
"Combining nuanced analysis, forceful narrative, and sensitivity to historical and contemporary Indigenous perspectives, William Kiser advances our understanding of genocide in North America by focusing on the practice of 'scalp warfare' over three centuries."--Jeffrey Ostler, author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas "In this sharp, disturbing book, Billy Kiser follows the bloody tracks of scalp hunters across centuries and around the continent. His journey reveals the wretched commonality of this state-sanctioned form of violence against Indigenous People."--Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War "In the growing literature on Indigenous genocide, William Kiser has given us the most thorough account of the state-funded destruction of Native peoples, the vigorous trade in body parts, and grisly boasts of organized slaughter. Ranging from Canada to Mexico, New England to California, Kiser's straightforward but detailed account will leave readers with a profoundly unsettling sense of a three-century catalogue of horror."--Elliott West, author of Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion