Past Wars on Indians Aren't Even Past
Hammer
in hand, one sees nails everywhere.
Successful unpunished genocide at
home in hand, the Pentagon sees Indian Country on six continents.
But
don’t imagine the U.S. military is finished with the original Indian
Country yet, including Native American reservations and territories, and
including the places where the rest of us now live.
Compare and contrast:
Exhibit 1 from the New York Times:
“Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian
casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all
military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several
administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence
posthumously proving them innocent.”
Exhibit 2 from a U.S. Army dispatch in 1864:
“All Apache . . . large enough to bear arms who may be encountered in
Arizona will be slain whenever met unless they give themselves up as
prisoners.”
Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech at Fort Carson with cavalry troops on
horseback dressed in Indian-killing outfits behind him, as he praised
troops in Iraq for living up to the legend of Kit Carson — a man who
marched hundreds of human beings to a camp later used as a model for the
Nazis’.
Osama bin Laden was renamed by the U.S. military, Geronimo.
Winona LaDuke’s The Militarization of Indian Country tells a
history that isn’t over, and describes a scene that cannot escape from
its past. Like Coleman Smith’s and Clare Hanrahan’s survey
of the militarization of the Southeast, LaDuke’s survey of militarized
Indian Country piles up numerous outrages to convey a picture of
purposeful devastation on a stunning scale.
Many Native Americans live in places called Fort This or Fort That,
keeping ever present the concentration camps these places were. They
remain among the poorest and most environmentally devastated sacrifice
zones in the United States.
“The modern U.S. military,” LaDuke writes, “has taken our lands for
bombing exercises and military bases, and for the experimentation and
storage of the deadliest chemical agents and toxins known to mankind.
Today the military continues to bomb Native Hawaiian lands, from Makua
to the Big Island, destroying life.”
Later, LaDuke summarizes:
“From the more than a thousand nuclear
weapons tests in the Pacific and the Nevada desert that started in the
1940s, obliterating atolls and spreading radioactive contamination
throughout the ocean and across large areas in the American West, to the
Vietnam War-era use of napalm and Agent Orange to defoliate and poison
vast swaths of Vietnam, to the widespread use of depleted uranium and
chemical weaponry since that time, the role of the U.S. military in
contaminating the planet cannot be overstated.”
In Alaska, 700 active and abandoned military sites include 1,900
toxic hot spots. People forget the seriousness of a failed plan to
create a harbor in Alaska by dropping a series of nuclear bombs. Some
of the actions that have in fact been taken have been only moderately
less destructive than that proposal.
Uranium mines, depleted uranium testing, and nuclear waste storage
have done as much or more damage to Indian Country as nuclear bomb
testing. U.S. nuclear weapons are largely located in Native American
territories, as well. If the Great Sioux Nation were in control of its
1851 treaty areas, LaDuke writes, “it would be the third greatest
nuclear weapons power on the face of the earth.”
Many Native Americans recognize in current U.S. foreign wars echoes
of wars against the Indian nations. And yet, American Indians have the
highest military enlistment rate of any ethnic group and the largest
number of living veterans (about 22 percent of Native Americans aged 18
or over).
“How,” LaDuke asks, “did we move from being the target of the
U.S. military to being the U.S. military itself?” Native Americans
also suffer from PTSD at higher rates than other groups — supposedly due
to higher rates of combat, but just conceivably also because of greater
cognitive dissonance.
I admit to finding a little of the latter even in LaDuke’s wonderful
book. She claims that sometimes there are “righteous reasons to
fight.” She opposes militarism but wants veterans to be honored.
I’m
writing this from a national convention of Veterans For Peace where I
know numerous veterans would reject the idea that veterans should be
honored. What veterans should do is organize more Native Americans and
other Americans together into a movement for the abolition of militarism
as well as the righting of past wrongs so that they will not any longer
be repeated.
David
L. Swanson is an American activist, blogger and author.
warisacrime.org
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