Happy Native American Heritage Month From the Army That Brought You the Trail of Tears

To celebrate Native American Heritage Month, the Pentagon has gone all out with ceremonies across the United States, from an Air Force-sponsored intertribal powwow in Florida to a celebration of  Native American aircraft nose art in Oregon.

The military has also been pumping out feel-good stories about Native American troops: one South Dakota National Guardsman from the Oglala Sioux tribe was allowed to grow out his hair, and an Air National Guardsmen from the District of Columbia who belongs to four different tribes reflected in his Lakota, Seneca, Navajo, and Comanche heritage.

The top official involved in the commemorations, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, gave a speech calling this month “a time to remember the achievements of indigenous peoples throughout our nation’s history” and proceeded to begin that history with a reference to the Navajo “Code Talkers,” who used their native language to create an unbreakable code for U.S. Marines during World War II. 

There is, however, quite a bit of history that Hicks’s historical timeline skips: roughly 170 years of armed attacks, forced relocations, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide of Native Americans carried out by the U.S. military.

“Acknowledging Native veterans and Native contributions is terrific. And there are a lot of proud Native veterans. But it’s one of those gestures that is nice in theory but is, perhaps, meant to whitewash how we understand Native American history and how Native Americans ended up in the place that we did,” said Keith Richotte Jr., the director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona. “It doesn’t really address the fact that there was this longer history in which military violence was critical to the subjugation of Native peoples and maintaining the colonial project. It ignores the military’s efforts in the late 18th and 19th centuries to essentially destroy tribes, tribal nations, and tribalism.”

Another expert on the topic put it more bluntly.

“The Army was, bottom line, an instrument of a settler colonial empire that was determined to convert Native lands into private property for mostly white settlers,” said Jeffrey Ostler, professor of history emeritus at the University of Oregon and author of “Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States From the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.” “That was its mission: to carry out a federal government policy that, in practice, often became a genocidal war.”

The U.S. Army, formed in 1775, fought alongside and against Native Americans from its very founding.

This appears to be a mealy-mouthed reference to the fact that the Oneida Homelands were estimated at about between five to six million acres of land at the end of the Revolutionary War, but following a raft of federal and New York state treaties and rulings were reduced to 32 acres by the early 1900s. (The Pentagon did not reply to a request to interview the author of the piece.)

The nascent U.S. military was less generous to Native Americans who didn’t join their colonial rebellion and sided with the British.

“The Army was an instrument of a settler colonial empire that was determined to convert Native lands into private property for mostly white settlers.”

In 1779, George Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign to bring about the “total ruin” of Six Nations settlements across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania and New York. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops,” read the orders sent to Maj. Gen. John Sullivan. “Our future security will be in their inability to injure us the distance to which they are driven and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire.” When the operation was over, Sullivan’s army had destroyed more than 40 villages and at least 160,000 bushels of corn.

The Pentagon’s celebratory articles about Native Americans’ cheerful service in the U.S. military and glaring historical gaps are further undermined by more accurate information available — if tucked away — on the U.S. Army Center of Military History’s own website.

There, the Army chronicles 14 named “Indian Wars Campaigns” stretching from the 1790s to the 1890s. That official history is a triumphant story of “expeditions” against “restless” and “hostile Indians” who were seen as an “obstacle to expansion”; Native people who act “treacherously” and exhibit “unrest” in reaction to “an influx of miners, and extension of railroads”; the destruction of Indigenous villages leading to “rapid settlement” in new areas by whites; defeats of tribes “on the warpath”; Native leaders hanged and “killed resisting arrest”; and Indigenous people — including “squaws” and children — forced from their lands; all culminating in a slaughter at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which even the Army’s history accurately portrays as a massacre:

On 15 December 1890, bureau police killed Sitting Bull … while trying to arrest him. … On the morning of 29 December, an effort to disarm [a group of Native religious revivalists] led to a shot being fired. It may have been an accidental discharge … but whatever the source, it led immediately to heavy and indiscriminate firing from soldiers and some return fire from the Lakota. … The soldiers also employed artillery despite the presence of numerous noncombatants. … When it was over, more than two hundred Lakota (perhaps as many as three hundred), including women and children, were dead. Army casualties totaled 25 killed and 39 wounded, some of whom likely were hit by friendly fire. … The Army conducted an investigation of the incident but never determined culpability.

Despite the racism and brutality toward Native Americans evident in the Army’s official chronicle, many of its worst atrocities against Indigenous people are conspicuously absent from the account.

In 1838, for example, Gen. Winfield Scott issued orders, on behalf of President Martin Van Buren, for eastern Cherokees to leave their ancestral homeland. An estimated 17,000 were driven from their homes, sometimes at gunpoint with few or no possessions as white looters ransacked their homes. Many were also put into internment camps before being pushed westward to what is now Oklahoma; a military-enforced displacement that became known as the Trail of Tears. Cherokee authorities estimate that 6,000 men, women, and children died on the 1,200-mile march.

After the Cherokee, the Army continued to forcibly displace other Native Americans. All told, around 88,000 people indigenous to the eastern United States were pushed westward in the 1830s and 1840s. Up to 19 percent died as a result.

Some of the most egregious U.S. military violence against Native Americans occurred during the Civil War. During these years, President Abraham Lincoln’s forces reserved their most vicious treatment not for the traitorous Confederacy, but for members of Native American tribes, subjecting them to depredations far worse than those meted out against white southerners.

“The Army’s mission could take different forms. Sometimes it could be removal. Sometimes they massacred people. It happened more in the American West than in the American East. But that basic template is there from the 1780s into the 1890s,” said Ostler. “The Army conducted surprise attacks designed to kill as many people as possible, including women and children, old men, babies. Everyone. This wasn’t out-of-control commanders. This was policy.”

In 1862, Col. James H. Carleton, the head of the U.S. Department of New Mexico, decided that Indigenous people must “give way to the insatiable progress of our race.” To that end, he issued orders to frontiersman Christopher “Kit” Carson: “All Indian men of [the Mescalero Apache] tribe are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them.” Carleton issued similar orders for the Navajo, as well. Carson, as a result, conducted a scorched-earth campaign, burning villages, slaughtering livestock, destroying water wells, forcing the Navajo to surrender, and then subjecting them to a forced march over hundreds of miles to an internment camp. Thousands died as a result.

In 1863, the U.S. military committed one of its largest single-day atrocities to date, near what’s now Preston, Idaho. Col. Patrick Edward Connor employed four companies of cavalry, one of infantry, and artillery against the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. “Kill everything!” he ordered. “Nits make lice.”

The U.S. troops went on a killing spree, shooting defenseless men, women, and children. Some troops reportedly raped women even as they lay dying while others used axes to bash in the heads of wounded children. By some counts, 250 Shoshone were slain, including 90 women and children. The tribe’s written history of the Bear River massacre estimates 350 deaths. Hans Jasperson, in his 1911 autobiography, said he walked among the corpses, counting 493 dead Shoshones. “I turned around and counted them back and counted just the same,” he wrote. Following the slaughter, Connor was promoted to brigadier general for his “heroic conduct.”

After Gen. John Pope was bested by the Confederacy’s Robert E. Lee at the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862, he was sent West to make war on Native people. “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so,” he wrote. “They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts.” While attempting to hunt down Santees in 1863, Pope’s forces encountered camps of peaceful Yanktonai, Hunkpapa, and Sioux, many of whom they killed. One American witness to the campaign said forces under Pope did “what no decent man would have done,” noting that they slaughtered women and children in what he called a “perfect massacre.”

In the Nebraska Territory in 1863, a group of Ponca were confronted by Seventh Iowa Cavalry troops. Brandishing revolvers, they offered the Native women money for sex and were rebuffed. The Ponca women fled, but the next morning the Americans tracked them down and killed three women and a young girl. The U.S. government called it a “very unfortunate occurrence,” but the next year an official report noted that “the murderers of several of this loyal and friendly tribe” had not been punished.

Col. John Chivington, the head of the Colorado military district, was another U.S. commander with a hatred for Indigenous people. “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians!” he told his troops. “I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.” 

Following numerous depredations by men under Chivington’s command, the “peace chief” Black Kettle of allied Cheyenne and Arapaho groups met with Army officers and negotiated a truce in September 1864.

Despite this, Chivington declared “scalps are what we are after” and led more than 700 troops to attack Black Kettle’s camp at dawn on November 29, 1864. In what the colonel called “an act of duty to ourselves and to civilization,” his men unleashed gunfire and artillery on the sleeping village.

In testimony before members of the U.S. House of Representatives, John S. Smith, a U.S. government official, testified that he watched Chivington’s troops massacre hundreds at Sand Creek. Questioned by Massachusetts Republican Daniel W. Gooch and Charles R. Buckalew, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, Smith detailed the horrors:

Mr. Gooch: Were the women and children slaughtered indiscriminately, or only so far as they were with the warriors?

Smith: Indiscriminately.

Mr. Gooch: Were there any acts of barbarity perpetrated there that came under your own observation?

Smith: Yes, sir; I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces.

Mr. Buckalew: How cut?

Smith: With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors.

Mr. Gooch: Did you see it done?

Smith: Yes, sir; I saw them fall.

Mr. Gooch: Fall when they were killed?

Smith: Yes, sir.

Mr. Gooch: Did you see them when they were mutilated?

Smith: Yes, sir.

Mr. Gooch: By whom were they mutilated?

Smith: By the United States troops.

For almost four hours, U.S. forces slaughtered the camp’s inhabitants, two-thirds of them women and children. Many Native women were also raped and mutilated, and Native American scalps, breasts, and genitalia  were taken as souvenirs. In an after-action report, Chivington wrote of “making almost an annihilation of the entire tribe” and then in a letter to Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis stated: “It may, perhaps, be unnecessary for me to state that I captured no prisoners. Between five and six hundred Indians were left dead upon the field.” No court martial was ever convened, and no punishments were meted out in connection with the massacre.

“I don’t think that your average person truly understands the levels of violence and coercion and destruction done to Native peoples and the direct involvement in the military in perpetuating that violence,” said Richotte. “A more honest telling of this history would, perhaps, force us to reckon with our understandings of that past.“

One hundred and sixty years after the Army failed to hold anyone accountable for hundreds of people massacred at Sand Creek, that service is honoring the “culture and heritage of Native Americans and Alaska Natives” by telling a story that, like Hicks’s history, begins with World War II.  

The hidden history excised by the Army, which includes sporadic battles with small bands of Native Americans into the 20th century, is one of success in dispossessing Indigenous people. Today, the effort to wrest land from Native Americans — chronicled in the Army’s history of the “Indian Wars” — is complete. The amount of land Native tribes currently have compared to what they once possessed shrank by 98.9 percent, according to a 2021 study in the journal Science. In many cases, however, no comparison was even possible. Of the 380 tribes analyzed, 160 no longer had any federally or state-recognized land.

While atrocities and forced displacement have been edited out of the Pentagon’s historical narrative, it is notable that numerous stories offered by the military this month still reference Native Americans’ struggles with outdated notions, racism, and cultural depredations. In one article, for instance, Sgt. 1st Class Lynette Eriacho, a soldier and member of the Navajo Nation, said she has “been asked whether Native Americans are all alcoholics, or if they still live in teepees.” Another piece offered up by the Army admonished troops and other Americans not to desecrate sacred sites and steal Native American artifacts.

The Pentagon has also shown a modicum of progress toward confronting its sordid past. This summer, the Defense Department announced that it will review the Medals of Honor given to 20 U.S. soldiers for carrying out the slaughter at Wounded Knee in 1890. The Pentagon did not respond to a request by The Intercept for the status of that review.

The Army also signaled that it will express regret for an 1869 terror campaign that included the shelling of a Lingít village near Wrangell, Alaska. In recent months, the Navy apologized “for wrongful U.S. military actions against Tlingit villages in Kake in 1869 and Angoon in 1882” — two communities packed with civilians that were devastated by U.S. attacks.

“We need a reckoning with our past,” said Ostler. “All nations need to grapple with their past in order to create a just society.” The Pentagon did not respond to questions by The Intercept about criticisms of its Native American Heritage Month celebrations and its selective history of U.S. military interactions with Native people.

Richotte called the Pentagon’s recent apologies to select Native people “a good start” but said it was only that: a start. “If it’s simply an acknowledgement, it’s hard to see it as quite enough. If all we’re left with is just words without some sort of additional meaningful action, then it seems to fall short of the promise of those types of acknowledgments in the first place,” he told The Intercept.

“Colonialism benefits by making Indigenous peoples invisible,” said Richotte. “And as long as that remains the case — as long as the few markers of visibility are perpetuated under the colonizers — nothing is going to change.”

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