You don’t say

Indeed.

I in fact drove by the Big Hole National Battlefield today on my way home from Utah.

Of course, it wasn't technically a battlefield...it was a f*****g massacre of largely women and children by U.S cavalry. If memory serves, it was the Nez Perce tribe, doing nothing except trying to escape to Canada.

Not much we can do now, what's done is done, but anyone who thinks the Natives got a fair shake in life is completely and utterly deluded.

I struggled with this myself years ago. It’s hard to admit you and everyone you know and love lives on land that was stolen in a most blatant fashion.

Tempting to think it was all “inevitable.” Tempting to believe in “survival of the fittest” and all that. Tempting to both-sides it with the (much smaller) number of casualties inflicted by Natives on whites. Tempting to point out that smallpox and other illnesses did most of the work. Tempting to deflect to all the other wars and conquests in human history.

But there’s conquest, and then there’s annihilation and near-total replacement. The latter is rarer and only occurs under conditions of extreme power imbalance. The conquest of the New World was the largest such event in human history. (Even the massacres of the European colonization of Africa don’t hold a candle to it, as shown by the fact Africa to this day is still inhabited mostly by Africans.)

Was it effectuated with dirty tricks? Broken treaties not worth the paper they were written on? Backstabs? Outright massacres? You bet.

And was it all fueled by racism? White supremacy? A belief that all of this was somehow for the Natives’ “own good”? Manifest destiny? You bet.

One thing a history professor taught me that really stuck with me: nothing in history is “inevitable.” History proceeds according to discrete decisions. Policies that once seemed “inevitable” can in fact be reversed.

And the decision made in this case, again and again, was that Native lives didn’t matter. That European settlers were going to take virtually everything and leave virtually nothing, “reservations” aside (where again due to our society’s collective decision not to value Native lives, living conditions are often abysmal: an ongoing re-traumatization of Natives).

We must confront all these difficult truths head-on, because it is the only way we can hope to muster the sense of urgency it will take to change, really change, things for America’s indigenous who are still here today.

Being born into a sucky situation doesn't automatically make you guilty of anything. Definitely have to understand what happened to bring that situation about though. That's my view, at least.