“0ur faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings”

Chief Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux

Sitting Bull

I was driving down a mountain road wondering who built it. I think about things like that when I look at my kids. I wonder if the notion of wonderment about everything around them ever crosses their minds, or they just accept the road as is.  Of course, it is a work in progress as all things are. Certainly American civilization is.

The United Stares is a young country, while being the oldest constitutional republic in the world. America did not always exist as it does today. That is true in several regards, most importantly are the extension of equal protections under the law — if not in reality — to every race, creed and gender that had been written out of American liberty and denied equal citizenship with the right to vote. But it is also true territorially. Look at America in 1800. John Adams was president. The western boundary of the United States stopped at the Mississippi River.

America had grown from 2.5 million people — 2 million free whites, 30,000 free blacks and 500,000 slaves — at the end of the American Revolution. By 1820, the American population would top 10 million people.

Approximately 400,000 Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains in 1800. By 1820, the number would be more than two million. The great westward migration was underway. The Americans of that time had a great lack of appreciation for government authority that decreased exponentially when they encountered other national authorities, particularly ones that didn’t speak English.

American presidents have long made comments about the peaceable character of the American people, while speaking to Americans who are usually peaceful when the president of the United States is speaking to them. That doesn’t mean they are peaceful as a group. We aren’t. We never were.  America is a violent country, and it always has been. The 19th century was a savage century of war, conquest, subjugation and the largest slaughter of warm-blooded animals in human history. The purpose of the slaughter was to starve and subjugate the Great Plains Indian Nations until they were forced into impoverishment on reservations.   

The last fighting that took place between the US Army and Indian warriors took place in the last quarter of the 19th century. It was the last combat that would take place on American soil and the last acts of war waged by the US Army on American soil — not withstanding the fighting that took place on the Mexican border in the early 20th century.

When 1800 dawned, France, England, Spain and Russia claimed vast territories on the North American continent that bordered the United States of America. The French saw the writing on the wall and sold their possessions in 1803. The US doubled in size in an instant with the Louisiana purchase. It also began 20 years of savage fighting over control of Florida, which was claimed by two powers, the Seminole Tribe and Spain. Florida would become a slave state, and later a Confederate State, and then later a segregationist one. When it became American territory in 1821, it had been a sanctuary to escaped slaves who became integrated and free with the indigenous tribes that had gathered in Florida, fleeing British expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries. Those were the Seminoles and three wars were waged against them by the United States over more than 40 years that ended on the eve of Civil War. These are the wars that made Andrew Jackson a national hero.

The America that existed between 1800 and 1820 was exploding in size and wealth and heading west. The European powers existed in a state of perpetual warfare that George Washington had warned about avoiding at all costs.

The United States and Great Britain fought a second vicious war in the second decade of the century, and despite best efforts, the United States could not prevail on British/Canadian soil. The final boundaries between British North America/Canada were settled under threat in 1846 from James Polk and his war slogan of “54-40 or fight.” Today’s border, set at the 49th parallel, marks the longest and most enduring undefended and peaceful international boundary in world history — the boundary between the United States and Canada. Like everything in the 19th century, it was shaped by violence, war, bluster, and threat.

The dominant American political ideology of the era became known as “manifest destiny,” and it held that the United States of America, guided by the hand of providence, was predestined to spread and control the entirety of the territory between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In the end, the most powerful nation won control of the territory, and once it was held, there would never be another foreign power to take it back from the people who claim it — the very fierce people of the United States.

What happened in 19th century America is that the dominant economic and military power settled all questions around its authority and power to control its sovereignty. It was a brutal era of history filled, like always, with both shame and glory.

A great American Civil War was fought from 1861-1865. It was the first true war of the Industrial Age and it prefaced the horror of total war in the 20th century. That war was led and fought by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the United States and Confederate Armies, as well as the freed slaves over which those armies fought.

Great railroads were built during the 19th century. They were built on the backs of Chinese laborers, who flooded into America through its west coast ports. There was a time when there were hundreds of time zones in America. Every town and village set its own clocks, but the necessity of rail schedules changed that. The country we know today was being built. It was being connected. Hundreds of thousands of people headed west into territories beyond the reach of government. There, the final confrontations took place between the great and noble indigenous nations and their nomadic way of life that had persisted for thousands of years until first contact with European settlers. Just as the Sioux had displaced the Crow, the United States was about to displace the Sioux.

Gold, oil, coal, machines, engines, hydraulics, steel, and imagination hurled America forward in a 100 years’ time to become one of the Earth’s preeminent powers. By 1900, the boundaries of America were settled and the population was 76 million strong.

It was the Americans who were born exactly 100 years ago in the early 1920s who charged onto the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima. These were the grandparents of Generation X Americans and some millennials. They were born just outside the shadow of the 19th century.

There seems to be a lack of curiosity in the American character around what just happened, as opposed to what is coming next. Perhaps it is a mark of national impetuousness that Americans seem mostly oblivious around the concept that America today is inexorably connected to America’s past. It remains an astounding fact and great piece of trivia that John Tyler, born in 1791, and the 10th president of the United States, whose treachery delivered him to service in the Confederate House of Representatives, has a living grandson in 2022.

There is an accompanying arrogance that rides comfortably with obliviousness and ignorance. It gives license to people in the present who know nothing of the past to indict the totality of the struggle for justice and progress against a present standard that is as deluded as it is preening. It is also not cost-free. There is a cost for fighting over the past, which cannot be changed, and it is a terrible one. The fight costs the future and strangles the imagination needed to create it.

Yet, there are occasions where great injustices can be recognized, repudiated and a new beginning forged with mutual grace, joy and achievement.

During the 19th century, the United States government signed and broke hundreds of treaties with tribal nations that were recognized as co-equal and sovereign in their standing with the American government. Most every one of those treaties stands irretrievably shattered and destroyed — as does any chance of achieving satisfaction for the legitimately aggrieved tribes. Most isn’t all, however.

The United States of America will celebrate its 250th birthday in four short years. It should be an occasion for an epic celebration of freedom, liberty, sacrifice and the courage of our ancestors. It should be an occasion for deep humility and gratitude with a real reckoning around the reality that both American freedom and prosperity remains elusive for people through discrimination and the legacy of historic persecution. Yet, the occasion will mark the birth of the greatest republic and greatest force for human dignity in world history.

Before that celebration, begins there should be three actions taken by the American Government:

1. A delegate of the Cherokee Nation should be seated as a Delegate in the United States Congress.  The United States of America is obligated by treaty to do this.

2. National Park and Forest land that sits on the sacred lands of the Lakota people in South Dakota should be returned to the Sioux Nation for administration in perpetuity. The United States of America is bound by treaty to do this.

3. The Medal of Honor should be stripped from the murderers who wore the uniform of the US Army and slaughtered defenseless men, women and children at Wounded Knee. The United States military is morally obligated to do this. It is a matter of national honor.

It is time to heal what has broken in America by fixing what can be fixed, while imaging what can be made better for both tomorrow and 20 years from now.

Within 100 years’ time the United States of America buried George Washington and stood at the edge of human flight, mass electrification, steel battleships, hygienic medicine, and scientific discovery that is the basis for this modern era.

America is always becoming something new, while surging forward into a new era. American freedom is defended by the Armed Forces of the United States. They are the most powerful and lethal military in world history. It is a volunteer force comprised of men and women from every inch of American territory comprising every faith, creed, race and ethnicity on Earth. It is bound together by a set of values that are character based. Its cause is the United States of America and that nation cannot be understood without understanding the greatness of its Native American tribes, their history, defiance, struggle, contribution and magnificent patriotism.

Apache, Black Hawk, Kiowa, Comanche, Chinook, Lakota are the names of the great tribes, which the US Army has named their helicopters. They are named in honor of the warrior spirit and fierceness of those tribes’ warriors. Yet, the greatest attribute of a warrior in Lakota culture was not fierceness, deadliness or success. It was humility.

Strength will be required to forge reconciliation. Weakness will be required to sustain more fighting. Humility will be required to listen. Listening will be required to hear, and hearing will be required to obtain wisdom. There is great wisdom in the culture of America’s native peoples who have forged this nation from its first hours. Harmony is at the center of much of American Indian belief. The white man has much to learn from this. There was a Lakota word for “white man” that roughly translated as “fat taker.”

There are many fat takers in 2022. They are not America’s destiny. They are America’s hangover. It is time to remember that tomorrow in America is decided by us, and not gravity, a small cabal or an emperor or king. We haven’t reached the promised land, but the American journey should be viewed as just getting started. That’s why these things should be made right. It matters.