Thread by @karl_jacoby

Just flabbergasted that @MaxBoot would use "our" #IndianWars as a model for US foreign policy

Why winning and losing are irrelevant in Syria and Afghanistan wapo.st/2G0a4qi?tid=ss…

To start with, the phrase "our Indian Wars, which lasted roughly 300 years (circa 1600-1890)" contains numerous misguided assumptions.

Who is the "we" being referenced in "our Indians Wars"? By selecting a starting date of 1600, near the beginning of European colonization but long before the US ever existed, he can only mean "we white people."

The ending date of 1890 is a clear allusion to the massacre at Wounded Knee, which took place on Dec. 29 of 1890, in which some 250 Lakota, most of them women and children, were killed by US troops armed with rapid-fire Hotchkiss cannons.

Although at the time the US government termed Wounded Knee a "battle" and awarded 20 Medals of Honor to the soldiers involved, most historians today consider it an atrocity.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

The Lakota who were killed were at peace and living on their reservation. They posed no threat to the army or white settlers.

Native Americans at the time and since have described the traumas of Wounded Knee.

Black Elk, Lakota spiritual leader, witnessed the aftermath: "what we saw was terrible. Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed... as they ran, and murdered them."

Charles Eastman, Lakota doctor and another witness: "“[T]here was no ‘Indian outbreak’ in 1890. ..[S]uch trouble as we had may ... be charged to dishonest politicians, who... first robbed the Indians, then bullied them, and finally in a panic called for troops to suppress them.”

Wounded Knee was later occupied by members of the American Indian Movement in 1973 to protest US Indian policy.

The fact that Wounded Knee would continue as an important site of memory in 1973 (and today) shows how the "Indian wars" produced generations of trauma.

I cannot understand why anyone would want to use the "Indian Wars," one of the nation's darkest chapters, as a model for current or future US policy.

For an excellent new overview of these issues, see @DavidTreuer's new book, THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE

nytimes.com/2019/01/20/boo…

I haven't even touched on the problematic way that Boot's comparison hinges on likening American Indians to terrorists.