I promised more reflections on the book AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
So here I go to the last chapter of the book, a paragraph which summarizes painfully well why and how our world and souls today are shaped by the genocide of America’s first inhabitants.
The conventional narrator of US history routinely segregates the “Indian wars” as a subspecialization within the dubious category of “the West.” Then there are the westerns, those cheap novels, movies, and television shows that nearly every US American imbibed with mother’s milk and that by the mid-twentieth century were popular in every corner of the world. (1) The architecture of US world dominance was designed and tested by this period of continental US militarism, which built on the previous hundred years and generated its own innovations in total war. The opening of the twenty-first century saw a new, even more brazen form of US militarism and imperialism explode on the world scene when the election of George W. Bush turned over control of US foreign policy to a long-gestating neoconservative and warmongering faction of the Pentagon and its civilian hawks. Their subsequent eight years of political control included two major military invasions and hundreds of small wars employing US Special Forces around the globe, establishing a template that continued after their political power waned. p. 218
(1) Slotkin GUNFIGHTER NATION.
(1) Slotkin GUNFIGHTER NATION.
None of this is normal or acceptable human behavior—hence the searing damage to our souls.
John K. Stoner