THE SET-UP: “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
When George Orwell penned that now-famous axiom for 1984 in 1948, he obviously meant it as a warning … not a roadmap. Seventy-five years later, and human beings remain fixated on controlling people with self-serving myths based on convenient readings of history. There was a moment when “Woke’ finally broke through and statues came down … but the overwhelming backlash to that moment of truth shows how threatening unvarnished history can be for people who’ve built their narrative on the permissive foundation of exceptionalism.
Yup, humans are using Orwell’s admonition as a roadmap.
President Donald Trump has made “historical cleansing” a key feature of his Presidency. Nettlesome truths have been scrubbed from the Smithsonian under the Orwellian guise of “restoring truth and sanity” to US History. Confederate names have been restored to military bases. And, perhaps most Orwellian of all, he reopened the closed issue of sports team mascots in an obvious attempt to misdirect people’s attention from the present with a controversy both from and about the past.
Although no one was asking for it, we’re getting it again. And regardless of the motive, the news media is entertaining the issue as if it wasn’t a sad ploy to keep the name “Epstein” out of the headlines.
One of the main arguments circulating around MAGA media asserts that Native Americans are okay with bringing back the cartoon caricature of Chief Wahoo or restoring the nickname “Redskins”—which Keetoowah Cherokee journalist Troy Littledeer explained in The Times (UK):
“Redskins” was never just a slur; it was a bounty term. In the 18th century, when the US was still using British pounds as currency, £50 was offered for the scalp of every male Penobscot, and £25 for those of women and children. These “red skins” were not metaphorical. They were literal receipts — bloody evidence in a state-sanctioned campaign that commoditised Indigenous lives and incentivised murder.
There’s little doubt that the vast majority of Americans don’t know that crucial bit of history … of their history … the history that explains the strange, widespread American phenomenon of states, cities, towns, rivers and lakes with indigenous names despite the fact that just 2.14% of the nation’s population is indigenous. Oddly enough, “redskins” sheds some light on it. Here’s Troy Littledeer again:
Many of us in the Native community may not have found the name offensive in the past — not because it wasn’t but because we had become desensitised. That is how these symbols do their damage: quietly, by reducing living cultures to logos.
Words matter — especially when they carry the weight of genocide. Defending “Redskins” as tradition is not just tone-deaf; it is dangerous. It signals that Native pain is still subject to debate, and that our dignity is disposable.
It is indeed ironic that this is coming up at the very moment Israel—with its “settlers” and forced relocations and nascent system of reservations and systematic dehumanization and divine dispensation to kill every man, woman and child because they are destined to manifest God’s plan on land inconveniently pre-occupied by less-then-human people—is franchising the US model with all-too similar results.
The symmetry between the “Winning of the West” and the “Winning of the West Bank” makes sense. It’s estimated that 10% of Israelis are dual citizens and between 120k and 200k of them are US citizens. They likely know America’s founding mythology and they carry it with them to the outlaw colonies they call “settlements,” thus harkening back to the hardscrabble homesteaders who “won the West.” With the help of the US Cavalry, they cleansed the land of people who weren’t pre-selected by God to manifest the destiny he’d designed for them.
Ironically, some of the earliest, “Hebrew-obsessed” settlers who washed up on the shores of New England believed its land was a Promised Land with a new Jerusalem. And, in what would become a recurring theme spanning three centuries, anyone who stood on their Promised Land was standing against God’s will and must be removed, relocated or eliminated. As such, America’s mythology of Exceptionalism is barely-refashioned Chosenness, with Protestant Americans casting themselves in the juicy role of God’s favorite people.
How odd it is that the US is now aiding and abetting the Israelis doing to the Palestinians what the US did to Native Americans … and with the same Biblical imprimatur?
Maybe it’s not odd at all.
Maybe it makes perfect sense that we can draw a straight line from the Pequots to the Palestinians. To quote another thinker’s admonition: “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”
Even worse, though, are the people who are fed historical lies and self-aggrandizing dogma … because those who cannot remember the past accurately often condemn others to endure the repetition of its worst crimes.
And that’s what is happening right now in Gaza. Israel is pantomiming America’s history of ethnic cleansing and doing so with America’s invaluable assistance. To question Israel’s brutality is to question ourselves. The answer, according to the re-revisionists, is to stop asking questions.- jp
TITLE: Research links 19th-century land program to sharp rise in Native American mortality
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-links-19th-century-sharp-native.html
EXCERPTS: When Congress passed legislation in 1887 that allotted individual American Indians pieces of land while also granting them citizenship, proponents of the Dawes Act argued it would give them greater independence to farm their own land and help them assimilate into white American culture.
But the Act had devastating consequences. By the time it was repealed in 1934, American Indians had lost two-thirds of all their native land and two-thirds of them had become landless or unable to meet subsistent needs.
And mortality rates—particularly among young Native Americans—spiked by roughly 20%, according to new Stanford research. While the average white American lived to the age of 65 by the mid-1930s, the life expectancy of American Indians at the time was 52. Much of this was due to child mortality disparities, which were exacerbated by allotment.
Although in 1900, an American Indian mother (regardless of allotment status) was more likely to have lost a child than a white mother (by 12.2 percentage points, or 64%), allotment may have increased this already wide gap by as much as 50%.
The General Allotment Act passed on Feb. 8, 1887—also named the Dawes Act after its author, Sen. Henry Dawes of Massachusetts—authorized the privatization of native tribal reservation land under the guise of protection for the American Indian population. Heads of households received an allotted 160 acres; others received 40–60 acres, depending on their age and household status.
Some government officials criticized the legislation as a ploy to take land away from American Indians and weaken their traditional way of life.
"The real aim of the bill is to get land out of Indian hands and into the hands of white settlers," wrote minority members of the House Committee on Indian Affairs when the Dawes Act was implemented. "If this were done in the name of Greed, it would be bad enough, but to do it in the name of Humanity, and under the cloak of ardent desire to promote the Indian's welfare by making him like ourselves, whether he will or not, is infinitely worse."
It wasn't until 1934 that the tribal governments were allowed to regain sovereignty under the Indian Reorganization Act—legislation meant to reverse some of the disparities created by the Dawes Act.
Indeed, the health disparity between Native Americans and other Americans persists. American Indians and Alaska Natives have a life expectancy of 65.6, compared to 76.4 for all other U.S. races. And they continue to die at higher rates than other Americans in many categories, including chronic liver disease, diabetes, homicide, suicide, and chronic lower respiratory diseases.
TITLE: History fuels high rates of Native American death at hands of police, experts say
https://auburnpub.com/news/state-regional/crime-courts/article_08d0c510-4606-52ff-99f7-b0aba776bd3d.html
EXCERPTS: Recent findings that Native Americans are more likely than any other racial group to die in encounters with law enforcement have deep roots, experts say.
“I think first you have to put it in historic context, and the reason we’re near the top if not atop the list of both police encounters and fatalities must be understood in the context of colonization and, essentially, centuries-old efforts to force Indigenous people away from their homelands, away from their communities, into urban settings where they don’t have a safety net or they don’t have much of a safety net,” said Gabriel Galanda.
Galanda belongs to the Round Valley Indian Tribes of California and is a Seattle-based Indigenous rights attorney who has represented the families of more than half a dozen Native Americans killed by the police.
Over the centuries, Native Americans were pushed against their will onto reservations. Once there, Galanda notes, many young Native Americans were forced to move again into far-flung boarding schools that further stripped them of their culture and language while subjecting them, in some cases, to abuse, neglect and even death.
“Which is to say that if somebody’s great-grandparents or grandparents or mom and dad were sent to boarding school or have suffered from some addiction or affliction as a result, that likely contributes to the moment that an Indigenous person finds themself encountering the police,” Galanda said. “So that’s unique to Indigenous America — that entire history of colonization and displacement.”
Municipal and state police departments have jurisdiction outside of reservations. But the federal government plays a major role on tribal land, where the BIA’s Office of Justice Services largely funds law enforcement.
Robyn Broyles, a Bureau of Indian Affairs spokesperson, said the bureau reported 51 use-of-force incidents to the FBI between January and August 2023, but she declined a request to interview someone from the department and did not provide more in-depth information about such incidents over time.
In February 2023, Lee Enterprises made another open records request for six years of individual or group use-of-force reports as well as reviews, summaries, “findings of policy violations or training deficiencies,” disciplinary actions and criminal investigative reports of incidents of use of force. Lee’s request remained pending as of press time.
Galanda believes that officers on and off reservations do not always consciously target Native people. But he argues that police are “not set up to succeed” when they encounter an Indigenous person who may be “suffering from addiction or affliction,” who “may not have a safety net” and who, by virtue of “intergenerational trauma” and a lack of resources, “may be sort of set up to fail and be killed.”
“And that moment, where their (police) biases overcome them and they may be more implicitly than overtly racial and they see a large, brown man in a bad mental state acting in a way that is perceived as violent,” Galanda continued, “they don’t know what else to do in that moment, other than shoot to kill or choke and kill, rather than de-escalate.
“I believe that’s even more the case in tribal country. Because there’s even less resources and less training and, candidly, the cops that are being hired in Indian Country may not be qualified to work in cities, towns and counties.”
Broyles, however, said that “BIA police officers are trained to use the appropriate amount of force necessary to make a lawful arrest.”
TITLE: Trump Told Park Workers to Report Displays That ‘Disparage’ Americans. Here’s What They Flagged.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/climate/trump-national-park-service-history-changes.html
EXCERPTS: According to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times, employees of the National Park Service have flagged descriptions and displays at scores of parks and historic sites for review in connection with President Trump’s directive to remove or cover up materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans.”
In an executive order in March, the president instructed the Park Service to review plaques, films and other materials presented to visitors at 433 sites around the country, with the aim of ensuring they emphasize the “progress of the American people” and the “grandeur of the American landscape.”
Employees had until last week to flag materials that could be changed or deleted, and the Trump administration said it would remove all “inappropriate” content by Sept. 17, according to the internal agency documents. The public also has been asked to submit potential changes.
The directive on national parks is part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to promote a more positive view of the nation’s history. In his executive order, the president also took aim at the Smithsonian Institution, claiming that it had promoted “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
Critics have warned that these moves could lead to the erasure of difficult periods of American history, as well as contributions made by people of color, gay and transgender figures, women and other marginalized groups.
“The national parks were established to tell the American story, and we shouldn’t just tell all the things that make us look wonderful,” said Dan Wenk, a former superintendent of Yellowstone National Park. “We have things in our history that we are not proud of anymore.”
Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, said many Park Service employees are obeying the executive order even though they disagree with it.
“Park staff are in a bind here,” Ms. Brengel said. “If they don’t comply with this directive, they could lose their jobs.”
Several Republican lawmakers have applauded the administration’s efforts to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives that portray historical events or figures as racist, sexist or otherwise flawed.
“Our monuments should celebrate our founders and tell the story of what makes America great, not push woke talking points to please radical activists,” Senator Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, said in a statement.
Already, the Interior Department has taken down sticky notes that Park Service employees used to annotate an exhibit at Muir Woods National Monument in California.
The sticky notes, which park staff added in 2021, were an attempt to present a more comprehensive history of the monument. They highlighted the Indigenous people who originally cared for the land, as well as the role of women in the 1908 creation of Muir Woods.
They also argued that while “influential, philanthropic white men” are frequently credited with preserving the site, problematic aspects of their legacies are often overlooked. For instance, John Muir, the famous naturalist for whom the park is named, used racist language in writings about African Americans and Native Americans.
The notes were removed last week pending a review in connection with the executive order, according to Joshua Winchell, a spokesman for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which includes Muir Woods.
At the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, park employees flagged an exhibit panel that discussed the bell’s travels across the country during the post-Reconstruction period. The panel “calls out the systemic and violent racism and sexism that existed at the time,” employees noted.
And at the nearby Independence National Historical Park, where the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were debated and signed, park staff raised concerns about an exhibit that memorializes nine slaves whom George Washington had brought from Mount Vernon. One panel emphasizes the intentional brutality of slaveholders, which included whippings, beatings, torture and rape.
Other content flagged for review addresses the federal government’s fraught relationship with Native American tribes.
At San Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in Florida, a park employee highlighted a panel on the imprisonment of Plains Indian tribes in the late 19th century. The panel noted that the U.S. Army had sent 74 prisoners from the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho and Caddo tribes to the fort after the Red River War, which sought to force Native Americans onto reservations.
“Text of panel needs review for language referring to tribes having choice of extinction or assimilation,” the employee wrote. “Language of U.S. Government giving the ‘choice’ of extinction could be considered negative toward the United States.”
Documents detailing the Park Service’s internal communications plans, also reviewed by The Times, instruct agency officials to respond to queries by saying that the Trump administration is focused on “historical accuracy.”