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Again: the Covington story bears the imprint of America's centuries-long tradition of captivity narratives, in which white children are imagined as innocent victims and Natives as savage aggressors.
As in the past, Native "aggression" provides a pre-text to seize resources. 
The historian Philip Deloria has termed this mode of thought "defensive conquest": the (misguided) belief that peaceful white settlers were only forced into conflicts because of Native violence.
Even the age difference between the Covington "boys" and the Omaha elder Nathan Phillips is significant. The "boys" represent an imagined, all-white future, the elder a "vanishing" Native presence. (Below one of the classic representations of this trope Gast's American Progress)
.@KimTallBear used this same image to illustrate her talk at @Columbia @IRWGS yesterday on "Molecular Death and Redface Reincarnation."
