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250 Years of Genocide, Theft, and Displacement

Natives have nothing to celebrate as the United States stages another sick-making festival of self-congratulation.

Reeducation: The boarding schools Native children were sent to, like this one in Ohio, were little more than brutal detainment camps.

Let’s be clear: I am not a fan of the 250th-anniversary celebration of the United States.

The official festivities to commemorate the anniversary—formalized under the Trump administration’s grift-laden Freedom 250 project—come off as little more than a red, white, and blue circle jerk. The invocation of the country’s founding as a landmark moment in the growth of democratic self-rule rings decidedly hollow in the absence of any serious reckoning with the nation’s actual past. And inevitably, that mature accounting must begin with an unstinting appraisal of the evils America has hammered on the heads of its first peoples since Christopher Columbus launched his brutal, lascivious “New World” endeavors lo these 534 years ago.

250 Years of Searching for a More Perfect Union

Will America Ever Give White-Man Rights To Everyone Else? Elie Mystal

Will America Ever Give White-Man Rights To Everyone Else?

Separation of Church and State: America’s Best Idea John Fugelsang

Separation of Church and State: America’s Best Idea

Alexander Hamilton, the Wrong Founder William Hogeland

Alexander Hamilton, the Wrong Founder

From an Indigenous perspective, this 250th anniversary should be a serious reflection on the traumas and damages the nation is guilty of rather than a firework-cracking celebration. The spectacle is something akin to seeing a judge wanly scold a habitual drunk driver for barreling full-speed into a parade, leaving the mangled bodies of women and children in his wake. The jurist would, in the same virtual breath, endorse the defendant’s phoned-in plea: The reason for sowing all this carnage and mayhem, the perp would explain, is that Jesus told him to.

That may sound like farcical hyperbole, but it’s pretty much the standard alibi that we Natives have heard since the first white man stumbled onto our shores. The justification for their mass murder and pillaging even has a name: Manifest Destiny. In 1872, the artist John Gast put paint to canvas to commemorate the term. He illustrated us, the Natives, running away into the darkness, fearing a huge, hovering, oncoming blond angelic figure with a horde of God-fearing white people at her back. Gast titled his iconic piece American Progress. But progress for whom? Not us.

America’s progress, according to the elected white men of Gast’s epoch, was hindered by the millions of Natives who lived freely on the land. So they declared every Native to be part of their “Indian problem”—the term the US government employed to justify policies that would eventually forcibly remove us from our homes. In all, billions of acres were stolen from this land’s first peoples for no other reason than that we weren’t Christian, we weren’t white, and we were spread out all over the continent the invaders wanted to claim for themselves.

These were certainly not live-and-let-live people who trundled to our shores from Europe. They were wašíčus—Lakota for “the greedy people.” There was never enough anything for them. There was never enough land to steal, mountains to drill into, gold to take, women to kidnap for their perverted pleasures—and then they came for our kids.

In a development all too characteristic of the selective amnesia of white Americans, people are only now coming to grips with the cruel legacy of the United States’ Indian boarding-school........

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