CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Ukraine and the Spirit of Red Cloud

Image Source: John Karl Hillers – Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – Public Domain

Imagine a public event 50 years from now in Kyiv. The convener speaks to the assembled crowd.

“Before we begin,” she says, “I just want to say that we acknowledge that we are standing on and benefiting from land that has been seized, expropriated, and stolen from the Ukrainian people. For thousands of years, this has been Ukrainian land. This is still the homeland of the Ukrainians. Their descendants are still living here among us.”

That’s what will happen if Russian leader Vladimir Putin gets his way—and gets his territory. He has never been discreet about his ultimate goal of absorbing all of Ukraine into the Russian federation, beginning with Crimea and the four provinces he has already annexed. It’s a classic colonial project, not substantially different from what settlers attempted to do to the Native Americans: seize their land and wipe them out as a people. The difference today is that Ukraine, recognized internationally as a sovereign nation, has received considerable international support for its defense. More than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians are not just fighting for territory or for a state but for the very survival of a people.

Let’s be clear: land acknowledgements wouldn’t exist in the United States if Native Americans had more successfully resisted the genocidal campaigns waged against them. That’s not to say that the tribes didn’t fight back, in some cases quite effectively. Take the case of Red Cloud, the Oglala Lakota war chief. As David Treuer writes in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee:

In a series of brilliantly staged attacks and battles, he pushed the U.S. Army back hundreds of miles, forcing them to abandon forts, trading posts, and supply lines. The defeats Red Could heaped on the U.S. Army forced it to abandon all of its forts in the region and to sign the second Treaty of Fort Laramie, which created the Great Sioux Reservation, in 1968. The Lakota were also guaranteed the right to hunt in the unceded territory as far as the Sandhills of Nebraska.

In a series of brilliantly staged attacks and battles, he pushed the U.S. Army back hundreds of miles, forcing them to abandon forts, trading posts, and supply lines.........

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