Virgin Lands: RDR2’s Dream of Colonizing Eden

Red Dead Redemption 2 mourns the loss of Eden: the outlaw life in pre-Industrial America. But under the brutal rule of colonialism, who is it who lost paradise?

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game, and occasionally the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.

One of the cleverest things the developers did in Red Dead Redemption 2 was to make the technical limitations of Red Dead Redemption thematic. John can’t swim; Arthur can. John prints; Arthur writes. Arthur is more eloquent and more intelligent. He’s a better shot and a better father. John shows awareness of this in “A New Future Imagined,” in which he consciously imitates Arthur. He calls Abigail “my lady,” just as Arthur frequently says to the women around camp. He gets his portrait taken with Abigail because that’s what Arthur and Mary did. He proposes with the ring Arthur gave Mary. In trying to be a better man, he tries to be more like Arthur.

He isn’t very successful. Some essential force that existed in Arthur is already a pale facsimile in John. “We killed him,” the bayou soothsayer cries, “and what did we replace him with? What? With what? With absolutely nothing. Enjoy.” This prophecy is about Christ; it’s also about Arthur. That’s the major theme of Red Dead Redemption 2: the failure of regeneration.

In Paradise Lost, when Adam and Eve break God’s injunction, they’re forced out of the Garden of Eden. Nothing replaces this loss; nothing can replace paradise. In RDR2, the unspoiled natural world is Eden. We see this idea in Evelyn Miller’s writings. In “An American Eden,” he says: “We must seek our solace, our comfort, our very heaven in the perfection and splendor of this place.” “This place” is “the American landscape.” He repeats this thought in “The American Inferno, Burnt Out I.” The game affirms his assessment by showing the beauty of the landscape and the ugliness of cities, particularly at the beginning of “The Joys of Civilization.” The nature of man’s fall, here, is industrialization. It’s the black smoke of factories, and oil spills smothering life¹.

Eden is a way of life, as well. The gang is one large family, and they’re nomadic, as opposed to the fixed existence of the nuclear family at Beecher’s Hope. It’s not that the gang specifically is paradisaical – they’re a mess – but the lifestyle is, in many ways, superior: they’re a family, and offer each other practical assistance and emotional support. Jack has aunts and uncles to help provide childcare and education. There are more people to perform all the necessary work. It’s closer to the way the first humans lived, before the advent of agriculture.

RDR2’s Misuse of Indigenous Characters

Most profound in fact, but not in the game, is the Eden that settler-colonizers stole from the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. By the late 1800s, the colonizers of the United States were well advanced on one of the most horrific programs of genocide² that the world has ever seen. RDR2 acknowledges the existence of colonialism through a few of the later missions, but this never serves as perspective for Arthur, or for the narrative. These facts are crammed in around the edges of the game, which does not, and cannot, look at them too closely, lest it realize that its foundational values are skewed.

The “real tragedy” in the game is the loss of the white male outlaw’s way of life. That RDR2 mourns this loss while morally condemning the gang is typical of the confusion of its themes. Moreover, the “Wild West” existed for about five minutes, as opposed to the thousands of years that Indigenous civilizations have. Although the context that allowed RDR2’s particular type of outlaw to exist is gone for good and Native American nations have survived, Indigenous peoples have inarguably suffered a far more profound loss. RDR2 does not recognize this.

Even when part of the narrative centers on a Lakota tribe, the focus is not so much the Indigenous characters, or even a white so-called revolutionary using Indigenous people for his own ends, but Dutch’s relationship with Arthur in allegory form. The narrative goes so far as to equate Eagle Flies with Arthur: “He’s me,” Arthur helpfully tells Rains Fall (“The King’s Son”). While Arthur as a character may well relate to Eagle Flies, for the game to equate the two is specious. Unlike the outlaws, Eagle Flies and his people are targeted by the United States not because of what they do, but because of who they are. The gang can stop breaking the law. The Lakota can’t stop being Lakota. Esther Wright explains that

Native American characters are only included in the narratives of RDR and RDR2 insofar as they offer a convenient device through which white outlaws like Dutch Van Der Linde, Marston, and Morgan are positioned as oppositional to “the Law” and those looking to “civilize” the West. That is, the value of Native Americans to the story Rockstar sought to tell about Westward expansion is directly proportional to their otherness, and to the white outlaw’s ability to reinforce their otherness through association with them. This is, in itself, a disingenuous oversimplification and (mis)use of the complexities of Native American genocide and “Indian Removal” in the nineteenth century.

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RDR2 is critical of the way Dutch uses the Lakota for his own ends, but the narrative uses them too. Rather than make any genuine attempt to portray their culture or the nuances of their situation, the game is only interested in how the white characters can be shown to relate to them.

Seeing as they’re human, it’s safe to say that Indigenous peoples did not live paradisaical existences prior to the European invasion, but any way of life guided by one’s own intact cultural traditions contrasts pretty sharply with genocide. Eagles Flies and Rains Fall fight to protect their vanishing way of life: their methods are similarly ineffective, but what Eagle Flies does – with the devil whispering in his ear – gets innocent people attacked and killed, and eventually the tribe is forced to flee their land. His actions lead to him dying in his father’s arms.

Again and again in RDR2, we see severed relationships between fathers and sons, and daughters — Mary Linton, Miriam Wegner, Agnes Dowd — held in the iron grip of their fathers, unable to marry the men they love. Both of Rains Fall’s sons are killed. The Rhodes gunsmith’s son died in front of him. Marko Dragic’s “son” kills him. John spends the first years of Jack’s life denying and ignoring him. Hosea hardly knew his father. Dutch’s, John’s, and Arthur’s fathers died when their sons were still young children. Lenny’s father was murdered; Sean’s was assassinated.

And Arthur’s beloved son Isaac was murdered, the greatest loss of Arthur’s life, and one he can hardly bear to talk or to think about, even many years later (“Archeology for Beginners”). He has no heir, no one whom he has created, shaped, and taught. Hosea, the man who is his truest father figure, is shot in front of him; minutes later, Lenny, the young man whom he mentored, dies in his arms. His connections to the past and the future are brutally severed in the space of 15 minutes. No one remains who’s able to carry his legacy.

The Wild West, like Eden, vanished, and nothing replaced it. Taken on its own terms, this is the great tragedy of Red Dead Redemption 2. It would be a mistake, however, to read the game that way. Sometimes, the richness of detail in the text functions like sleight of hand: misdirection abounds, calling attention away from what’s really going on. The sheer number of trees distracts the player from the forest. The game’s bloated quality also betrays Rockstar’s poor setting of priorities, both in the game design and philosophically.

RDR2 Dreams of Colonization

What RDR2 doesn’t want to admit is that Dutch’s Boys weren’t innocent in the project of colonization. The game demonstrates a fractured understanding of this at best. The dream Dutch sells, like the one Rockstar does, is deeply problematic. The gang’s ultimate goal was to colonize, to be “ranchers out in virgin lands in the WEST” (Arthur’s journal, entry after “Revenge is a Dish Best Eaten”). This “virgin land,” like Eden, is a myth — but this one is told to justify genocide. In reality, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz puts it, “Native peoples had created town sites, farms, monumental earthworks, and networks of roads, and they had devised a wide variety of governments, some as complex as any in the world” (46). When Europeans arrived to the continent, they

discovered an inhabited land. Had it been pristine wilderness then, it would possibly be so still today, for neither the technology nor the social organization of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from home. Incapable of conquering true wilderness, the Europeans were highly competent in the skill of conquering other people, and that is what they did. They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a resident population.

Francis Jennings, quoted in Dunbar-Ortiz, 46-47.

The realization of Dutch’s dream, as part of the program of Manifest Destiny, would have been far worse than its failure. The people who once lived on that “virgin land” were forced onto Reservations so that men like Arthur and Dutch could farm it. As Dunbar-Ortiz describes, “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” (96). Although it’s obvious that Dutch is using the Lakota tribe who live at Wapiti, the fact that the vision he sells his followers is the reason that the United States committed its genocides of Indigenous peoples goes unremarked on by the characters and the text at large.

Dutch’s backup dream, too, is one of colonization. When Dutch pitches the Tahiti idea to Arthur, he calls it “an untouched paradise,” which would probably be news to the Māʼohi. Arthur quite reasonably asks, “Who lives there?” Dutch huffily replies: “Tahitians, I guess” (“Urban Pleasures”). It doesn’t matter to him. As far as he’s concerned, it’s his for the taking. This is as close as RDR2 comes to acknowledging the gang’s own colonialism, and the focus is more on Dutch’s inability to make a plan than the troubling nature of the gang’s lost dreams.

To deal honestly with this fact would curtail the mood of epic tragedy the game is so determined to create. Arthur Morgan is one of the most-beloved characters of all time for a reason; his death, in particular, is gutting. But if we pull the camera back to take in the broader context, it’s obvious that, as Matt Margini says,

If you’re a woman or a native of a person of color, the death of the cowboy might be good riddance: Too often the cowboy, however much he lacks agency, is still actively complicit in systems of oppression that prevent marginalized people from having any agency to begin with. Too often, nostalgia for the cowboy is really nostalgia for colonialism—for a world that openly gave agency to some at the direct expense of others.

“History”

While it’s true that the Wild West has vanished entirely and Native nations have, through their own remarkable resiliency, survived, what the Indigenous peoples of this continent have had stolen from them is still the far greater loss. The truth that RDR2 refuses to acknowledge is that it isn’t the gunslingers and outlaws that we should mourn: it’s the peoples that the settler-colonialists and government of the United States committed unspeakable violence against.

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1. Executive producer and writer Dan Houser is slinging NFTs now, so one of the most crucial figures in creating the game doesn’t even believe in one of its core themes: the importance of preserving the natural world from corporate (and personal) greed. All things considered, this seems less likely to be hypocrisy and more likely a cynical ploy to appeal to players who appreciate the game’s natural setting. The creators not believing in what they’re writing and merely trying to appeal to as broad a base as possible would certainly go a long way towards explaining the game’s frequently contradictory themes. ↩︎
2. It’s not uncommon to be confused about what actually constitutes genocide. Here’s the legal definition from the United Nations:
   “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
   (a) Killing members of the group;
   (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
   (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
   physical destruction in whole or in part;
   (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
   (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” ↩︎

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