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Commemorating Genocide: June 25, 2026

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            Whatever you call him, George Armstrong Custer was an American military leader who had no ethical problem with bringing the “horrors of war” to unarmed and innocent women and children.  As we reach in this year of commemoration the 150th anniversary of his death at the Battle of the Greasy Grass on June 25th, 1876, it is worth keeping that in mind.

            Long ago, when I lived in Billings, a friend and I drove out to a ranch on the Crow Reservation in Montana.  A promoter had scheduled a reenactment of “Custer’s Last Stand.”  We took our seats in the bleachers.  Crow actors played the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who wiped out the American forces. A traditional Crow healer blessed the actor playing Custer before the show began.  And, then, the actor playing Crazy Horse galloped into our view.  He stared down the audience, let out a war whoop, and then galloped off at full speed.  It was a striking and startling opening.  Immediately afterwards, the father of a white family seated in front of us turned to one of his tow-headed children and said, “There you go, Courtney. You’ve seen your first real Indian.” He could not see that the audience that surrounded him was made up overwhelmingly of Indigenous people from the Crow and neighboring Northern Cheyenne Reservation. They were decked out in t-shirts and jeans, baseball hats and cowboy hats and boots and sneakers. They were invisible to him.

            Custer saw little worth saving in Indigenous peoples.  He wanted them, and their way of life, to disappear. Custer was not alone. The poet Walt Whitman wrote a “Death Sonnet for Custer,” asserting that his resounding defeat

Continues yet the old, old legend of our race!

The loftiest of life upheld by death!

The ancient banner perfectly maintained!

(O lesson opportune—O how I welcome thee!)

Custer died for us, Whitman asserted, paying the necessary price for civilization to conquer barbarism.  It’s an image of Custer that enjoyed a long life.  Look at depictions of Custer in art: There he is, standing in his bright buckskin, long locks flowing, in the midst of a sea of savages. Custer fell, yes, but the Indians who killed him would fade away as well. Custer marched with orders to push them on to reservations; others would cart Indigenous children off to boarding schools, attack their religions, and coerce culture change. Except it did not happen quite that way. Custer was no martyr.  He was a violent fool. And with difficulty the people he attacked persisted.

I like much better the image of Custer portrayed by Richard Mulligan in Arthur Penn’s film “Little Big Man.” It’s the story of Jack Crabb, the oldest and only survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Played by Dustin Hoffman, Crabb had lived among the Indians, and he had been along the Washita River in 1868 when Custer’s forces launched their infamous attack. On the 1876 campaign, Hoffman’s Crabb served as a scout for Custer, who asked him about the Sioux village along the Little Bighorn.

Crabb: General, you go down there.

Custer: You’re advising me to go into the Coulee?

Crabb: Yes, sir.

Custer: There are no Indians there, I suppose.

Crabb: I didn’t say that. There are thousands of Indians down there. And when they get done with you, there won’t be nothing left but a greasey spot.  This ain’t the Washita River, General, and them ain’t helpless women and children waiting for you. They’re Cheyenne braves and Sioux. You go down there, General, if you’ve got the nerve.

Custer: Still trying to outsmart me, aren’t you, mule-skinner? You want me to think that you don’t want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is, you really don’t want me to go down there!”

Reassured, Custer launches his attack. Two thousand warriors camped there out of his sight. They determined to defend themselves and their families. Depicted so often in American myth as a famous “Last Stand,” Custer’s defeat was a rout. The Sioux and their Cheyenne allies mowed them down as they fled from a village so much larger than they had anticipated. The Sioux wiped out Custer’s command in the time, one Sioux observer later noted, that it took a hungry man to eat his dinner. Only Custer’s Crow and Arikara scouts, who recognized the power of the Sioux, survived the assault.

            The Lakotas won the battle, but they lost the war. That’s how the story is told. Once again, as in 1868, winter campaigns drove the Sioux and their allies back to the reservation. By the spring of 1877, most had returned. Crazy Horse surrendered at the Red Cloud Agency in May. He died four months later, stabbed to death during a guardhouse scuffle. Sitting Bull, who had fled across the border into Canada, held out until 1881, before he returned. He was gunned down late in 1890, just days before the massacre at Wounded Knee.

The campaign of 1876, and those that followed, taught the slow-learners in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to reconsider their approach. They recognized the extent to which they relied upon violence, coercion, and conquest to place Indigenous peoples upon reservations and to keep them there. Reservations had once seemed an attractive solution to what these men deemed the “Indian Problem.” By concentrating and isolating Indigenous peoples from the vices of the surrounding white population, the reservation, its advocates hoped, bought them time to become civilized and Americanized. But neighboring whites seldom respected reservation boundaries, and corrupt government agents undermined the paternalistic concern of the federal government to care for its Indian wards. Congress failed to provide reservation Indians with the supplies they needed to undertake the great transition their White Father envisioned. Indigenous peoples found themselves under siege. They no longer could live their accustomed way of life in their homelands. Neither could they live well on the reservation. Whether they moved to the reservations voluntarily or as the result of military conquest, they suffered. But they did not disappear. Despite the efforts of federal agents, missionaries, and teachers to eliminate their culture, and despite their own decisions to make use of some of what the Americans offered them, these communities survived.

This year is the 350th anniversary of the attempt to eradicate Virginia’s Indigenous people during a genocidal uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion.  It is, of course, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence which unified rebellious colonists around their hatred of “merciless Indian savages.” It is the bicentennial of the 1826 treaty at Buffalo Creek, an agreement through which a business operation known as the Ogden Land Company and their friends in high places stole a third of the Senecas’ remaining lands in New York State in violation of the federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Act.  And, today, the we commemorate the defeat of a foolish proponent of genocide and the men who followed him.

            I am not sure what sort of commemorations will take place in Montana.  Custer seems like the kind of guy Trump would want celebrated. I remember the plaque erected at the Little Bighorn National Monument by a group of activists led by Russel Means in June of 1988. It read: “In honor of our Indian patriots who fought and defeated the U. S. Cavalry in order to save our women and children from mass murder. In doing so, preserving our rights to our homelands, treaties, and sovereignty.”

            That plaque was on display when I first visited Little Bighorn in the fall of 1994.  I was told at the time that the first Native American director of the National Monument was spit on by white visitors who grew angry when they saw the plaque in the small museum at the Visitor’s Center. I am not sure if it is still there, and its been thirty years since I last visited.  But I remember well that the Trump administration, just four months ago, ordered the removal of “signage describing broken promises to Native American tribes and references to the loss of Indigenous culture and language under boarding school systems.” The white supremacists nourished by the MAGA movement share the views of Custer. On this commemoration, let’s call them by their true names.

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The Widow’s Cause

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SHE HEARD THE SIGNAL CANNON and made her way toward the sound. She was looking for her husband’s camp. After the battle, after the defeat, everyone scattered. She carried a child, who could not have been more than a few months old. Tired, she wandered the countryside in the late summer heat.

              It is not clear how long she walked, or how far, or from whence she came, but she found the camp. Her husband served under Colonel Butler. This she knew. She asked a sentry to take her to the officer and the soldier obliged. For the first time in a while she sat down.

              The woman sought out a British camp, and the Tory officer Col. John Butler. She found herself, instead, in an American camp. She realized her error when Lt. Col. William Butler of the 4th Pennsylvania regiment greeted her. In the words of Jeptha Simms, a nineteenth-century antiquarian who recorded this story, “the truth flashed upon her mind—she was in the American camp, in the presence of those who would protect her.” So she told them her story.  Born in Danbury, she married and then joined the movement of Connecticut settlers into Pennsylvania.  She and her husband settled in the Wyoming Valley.  In July 1778, Seneca and Tory raiders attacked. “That delightful country” Simms wrote, “was devastated by the enemy.” Her husband fell in the fighting, one “among the numerous victims of savage cruelty.” She had “two small boys, and an infant at the breast.” The attackers killed the baby, and gave the boys each to a grieving Indigenous family. They then took her prisoner and, Simms said, “compelled her to live with an Indian as his wife.”

              It was this husband who she sought out in what she expected would be a British camp. But in Simms’ telling, the Americans amongst whom she arrived saw things differently. She had “providentially” entered this American camp. God was at work and he liked white Americans. The baby she carried in her arms was “the fruit of her late unhappy connections.”

              The American soldiers she encountered were part of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign of 1779, a large American invasion of the Haudenosaunee homeland. Before they commenced their march, Sullivan’s men drank toasts, “civilization or death for all American savages.” These men were killers, menacing “Long Knives,” who threatened Iroquois lives, liberties and property, and killing Indians and taking their lands was fundamental to who they were. These Americans, who declared their independence from Great Britain because George III unleashed the “merciless Indian savages” upon American frontiers, had delivered this poor woman from evil.  Her baby, Simms tells us, died shortly after she arrived in the American camp.  “It was suspected,” Simms wrote, “that an American soldier, from sympathy to the woman, had given it poison.”

I AM WORKING on a history of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign. I am at the early stages of my research. I am not certain that the Simms’ story is true, but I am also not sure that it would be impossible to find out.  I plan on spending some time trying to figure that out.  This story has stuck with me, like a hook in my lip, pulling me along.  I came across this story on the same day that the President threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization. He threatened to destroy bridges, power plants, desalinization facilities, all targets that would have made life even more miserable for Iranians. Civilians would have suffered. Children would have died.

              The President’s “Secretary of War,” a vicious, scripturally illiterate weirdo who relishes violence when it is meted out and upon someone else, said of the American raids on Iran that “God deserves all the glory,” and that thousands of sorties had been “carried out under the protection of divine providence” and “miraculous protection.” Pete Hegseth follows no law, one of his dwindling number of admirers said, outside of Biblical Law. 

              But that’s not right, is it.  One of those laws, it seems to me, is pretty clear:

                                           “Cease to do evil,

                                                          Learn to do good,

                                           Seek justice,

                                                          Correct oppression,

                                           Defend the fatherless,

                                                          Plead for the widow.”

Kill babies. Extirpate savages. Burn their fields. “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell.” They are more than words. They conjure a reality that is world-churning and evil, the black heart of America.

              I write these words safely at home in western New York. No bombs fall on me. I have water, fuel, and food, and the means to obtain more if I need it. On the day I read Simms’ account, the President woke up to launch an angry, frightened (and frightening) series of threats against the people of Iran.  The crisis deescalated. Diplomats allowed the president to save face. Still, his threats were significant. I have not forgotten them. Announcing that you are willing to annihilate Iranian civilization is not all that different from saying “civilization or death” to “merciless Indian savages.” The words have been set free and I am not sure they can be called back. I cannot say that Donald Trump would not use nuclear weapons.  Neither can you.

              So what do we do? I have seen a growing number of Democrats call for invoking the fourth section of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution.  It is an important gesture, I suppose.  It is worth putting it on the record.  But let’s harbor no illusions. A flawed constitution cannot stand when the men and women who hold power no longer feel bound by its limits, and know that too many of their supporters know too little about what that Constitution says to call them to account. And we certainly ought to know by now that “the vice-president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments, or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” are unlikely to “transmit to the President Pro-Tempore of the senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” There is no reason to expect Republicans to experience an epiphany. Trump is, for them, a useful idiot. He says obnoxious, frightening and dangerous things, but they get to dismantle the legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society. Republicans have done nothing to stop the President and we should not expect them to start now. Nobody is coming to help us. If we want to stop this, we are going to need to shut it down ourselves, and that will take much more than a “No Kings” party held on a weekend every couple of months.  It is going to take so much more than clever signs and an open calendar.

              I am wearied by Democrats who say that Trump’s behavior is “unAmerican,” that he behaves in a way that does not represent “who we are.”  Nearly 60% of white people voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, despite his felony convictions, his amoralities, and the corruption of him, his cabinet, and his skanky kids. Hungary has shown us that absolutists can be brought down by committed people organizing to actively oppose autocracy. I am hopeful that the Republicans will lose, eventually, because they are fighting against time and the very real gains that have been made over the last half century in building a society that certainly is imperfect and appears like a wasteland to younger people but that is more free and more equal than the world of our parents. Millions of Americans are committed to building and defending a country that is more free and equal than the white-supremacist world white Republicans want to restore.  And that is what worries me.  White people voted for white supremacy in the last three elections.  That white supremacy has been there from the beginning.  That cruelty, that violence and that despair.  That, too, is America.

Teaching Native American History

We Need to Talk About Genocide When We Teach Native American History

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            Bret Stephens wrote a piece in the New York Times a while back in which he asserted that what Israel is doing to Palestinians, despite its violence and the enormous loss of life, does not constitute genocide. Stephens’ logic is familiar to those of us who teach Native American history. Written under a headline that reeks of condescension, (“No. Israel is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza”) Stephens mounts several familiar arguments.

            If the Israelis really were acting with genocidal intent, why hasn’t their offensive in Gaza “been more methodical and vastly more deadly?” If it wanted to, Stephens argued, Israel could wipe Gaza off the map. It hasn’t, he says. “In short,” he writes, “the first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: why isn’t the death count higher?”

            Stephens can’t help himself. You see it, don’t you? He cannot write without dismissing the seriousness of the other side’s views. What he calls the “anti-Israel genocide chorus,” to others might more accurately be called “humanitarians,” or “people who think it is wrong to murder children or starve civilians.”  He does not care about what you think.

            Stephens next tries to make his case by relying on a strictly literal reading of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, which says that genocide is “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such”. Genocide, Stephens argues, does not mean “too many civilian deaths,” which he sees as just another unfortunate consequence of warfare.  Genocide, Stephens argues, is what the Nazis and Hutus of Rwanda did—they systematically tried to kill every person in a certain target population.  Israel is not doing that, he says, but Hamas surely did when it attacked young Israelis attending a music festival.  There are no death camps in Gaza, Stephens seems to suggest, and because of that, the Israelis cannot be considered guilty of genocide.

Stephens next dismisses what he sees as a “handful of remarks by a few Israeli politicians dehumanizing Gazans and promising brutal retaliation,” as inadequate to prove genocidal intent. But it wasn’t a handful of statements, a fact of which Stephens is surely aware. It was five hundred statements. Defense Minister Yoan Gallant called the Palestinians “animals.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Gaza “a city of evil,” its residents “monsters.” “This is a battle, not only of Israel against these barbarians, it is a battle of civilization against barbarism.” Nor is it only a matter of Israel’s words. The U.N. Convention, created after the World War II, saw genocide as more than killing, but also an attempt at “causing serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group,” or inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” You cannot watch the news and not see actions that meet these definitions. Gaza has been destroyed, its population is dead, gone or starving.

            And here’s another point. Stephens does not believe Israel is committing genocide. Many politicians in both parties would agree with him. Those people would also be unwilling to admit that America’s historic treatment of Indigenous people was genocidal. They quote the UN Convention. They think of what the Nazis did.  Nope, they say, this is not that.

            I have a different approach. At the American Society for Ethnohistory Conference in Florida in November of 2023, a colleague who I respect deeply asked me, quietly, “you’re going to talk about it, aren’t you?” Israel had just begun its campaign of retaliation, and we both heard how familiar the Israeli statements sounded. What Israelis said, blood-thirsty Americans said as well, before they launched their assaults on Indigenous people. So in my Native American survey course, we talk about genocide. How could we not? My students read Jeff Ostler’s fantastic essay that appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly back in 2015. Ostler cut through much of the debate over whether American conduct towards Indians was genocidal or not.  Listen to Indigenous peoples, Ostler said. They believed that the British, and then the Americans, operated with genocidal intent. Americans said it again and again, and they acted on those words just enough to make the belief that white people wanted to kill all Indians plausible.

            My plea is for people like Stephens to listen less to the perpetrators of violence, and certainly to take seriously those who denounce the actions of Israeli forces. Listen to those on the receiving end. Take what they say to heart. Stephens and those who share his views can strictly scrutinize the UN Convention, and quibble over the meaning of words, or they can simply listen to the people living in Gaza. I do not feel myself bound by the UN definition, written almost seventy-five years ago as people tried to make sense of a form of evil that remains still too common. Like so many Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Gazans are saying that the Israelis are killing us, with bullets, bombs, and now starvation. “They are killing us,” people in Gaza say. “They want us dead.” Who, watching what has happened over the past two years, can say that is an unreasonable assessment of their reality.  Israel is doing in Gaza what historians of Indigenous America have seen before. There is no excuse. It is vicious. And it needs to stop now.