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Battle of the Little Bighorn

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought on June 25, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, pitted federal troops led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer (1839-76) against a band of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Tensions between the two groups had been rising since the discovery of gold on Native American lands. When a number of tribes missed a federal deadline to move to reservations, the U.S. Army, including Custer and his 7th Cavalry, was dispatched to confront them. Custer was unaware of the number of Indians fighting under the command of Sitting Bull (c.1831-90) at Little Bighorn, and his forces were outnumbered and quickly overwhelmed in what became known as Custer’s Last Stand.Battle of the Little Bighorn: Mounting TensionsSitting Bull and Crazy Horse (c.1840-77), leaders of the Sioux on the Great Plains, strongly resisted the mid-19th-century efforts of the U.S. government to confine their people to Indian reservations. In 1875, after gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills, the U.S. Army ignored previous treaty agreements and invaded the region. This betrayal led many Sioux and Cheyenne tribesmen to leave their reservations and join Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in Montana. By the late spring of 1876, more than 10,000 Native Americans had gathered in a camp along the Little Bighorn River–which they called the Greasy Grass–in defiance of a U.S. War Department order to return to their reservations or risk being attacked.In mid-June, three columns of U.S. soldiers lined up against the camp and prepared to march. A force of 1,200 Native Americans turned back the first column on June 17. Five days later, General Alfred Terry ordered George Custer’s 7th Cavalry to scout ahead for enemy troops. On the morning of June 25, Custer, a West Point graduate, drew near the camp and decided to press on ahead rather than wait for reinforcements.Battle of the Little Bighorn: Custer’s Last StandAt mid-day on June 25, Custer’s 600 men entered the Little Bighorn Valley. Among the Native Americans, word quickly spread of the impending attack. The older Sitting Bull rallied the warriors and saw to the safety of the women and children, while Crazy Horse set off with a large force to meet the attackers head on. Despite Custer’s desperate attempts to regroup his men, they were quickly overwhelmed. Custer and some 200 men in his battalion were attacked by as many as 3,000 Native Americans; within an hour, Custer and all of his soldiers were dead.The Battle of the Little Bighorn, also called Custer’s Last Stand, marked the most decisive Native American victory and the worst U.S. Army defeat in the long Plains Indian War. The demise of Custer and his men outraged many white Americans and confirmed their image of the Indians as wild and bloodthirsty. Meanwhile, the U.S. government increased its efforts to subdue the tribes. Within five years, almost all of the Sioux and Cheyenne would be confined to reservations.

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When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’

By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained of the estimated 5 million-plus living in North America before European contact.On a cool May day in 1758, a 10-year girl with red hair and freckles was caring for her neighbor’s children in rural western Pennsylvania. In a few moments, Mary Campbell’s life changed forever when Delaware Indians kidnapped her and absorbed her into their community for the next six years. She was among the first of some 200 known cases of white captives, many of whom became pawns in an ongoing power struggle that included European powers, American colonists and Indigenous peoples straining to maintain their population, their land and way of life.While Mary was ultimately returned to her white family—and some evidence points to her having lived happily with her adopted Indian tribe—stories such as hers became a cautionary tale among white settlers, stoking fear of “savage” Indians and creating a paranoia that escalated into all-out Indian hating.From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.The reasons for this racial genocide were multi-layered. Settlers, most of whom had been barred from inheriting property in Europe, arrived on American shores hungry for Indian land—and the abundant natural resources that came with it. Indians’ collusion with the British during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 exacerbated American hostility and suspicion toward them.Even more fundamentally, Indigenous people were just too different: Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension. To settlers fearful that a loved one might become the next Mary Campbell, all this stoked racial hatred and paranoia, making it easy to paint Indigenous peoples as pagan savages who must be killed in the name of civilization and Christianity.Below, some of the most aggressive acts of genocide taken against Indigenous Americans:The Gnadenhutten MassacreIn 1782, a group of militiamen from Pennsylvania killed 96 Christianized Delaware Indians, illustrating the growing contempt for native people. Captain David Williamson ordered the converted Delawares, who had been blamed for attacks on white settlements, to go to the cooper shop two at a time, where militiamen beat them to death with wooden mallets and hatchets.Ironically, the Delawares were the first Native Americans to capture a white settler and the first to sign a U.S.-Indian treaty four years earlier—one that set the precedent for 374 treaties over the next 100 years. Often employing the common phrase “peace and friendship,” 229 of these agreements led to tribal lands being ceded to a rapidly expanding United States.

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#Indian

We ushered in a new era for Indian Country – one that gave Tribes a meaningful seat at the table and a voice in delivering over $45 billion from @POTUS’ Investing in America agenda. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1880336506323365985

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How Boarding Schools Tried to ‘Kill the Indian’ Through Assimilation

Native American tribes are still seeking the return of their children.That was the mindset under which the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. Decades later, those words—delivered in a speech by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt, who opened the first such school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879—have come to symbolize the brutality of the boarding school system.The history of this forced assimilation is far from settled. On August 7, 2017, the U.S. Army began exhuming the graves of three children from the Northern Arapaho tribe who had died at Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1880s. The children’s names were Little Chief, Horse and Little Plume—names they were forbidden to use at the school.Students at Carlisle and the roughly 150 other such schools that the government opened were susceptible to deadly infections like tuberculosis and the flu. During Carlisle’s operation between 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 other children were buried in the same cemetery as the Northern Arapaho boys, according to The Washington Post.Carlisle and other boarding schools were part of a long history of U.S. attempts to either kill, remove or assimilate Native Americans. In 1830, the U.S. forced Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi to make room for U.S. expansion with the the Indian Removal Act. But a few decades later, the U.S. worried it was running out of places to relocate the country’s original inhabitants.“As white population grew in the United States and people settled further west towards the Mississippi in the late 1800s, there was increasing pressure on the recently removed groups to give up some of their new land,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Since there was no more Western territory to push them towards, the U.S. decided to remove Native Americans by assimilating them. In 1885, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price explained the logic: “it is cheaper to give them education than to fight them.”As part of this federal push for assimilation, boarding schools forbid Native American children from using their own languages and names, as well as from practicing their religion and culture. They were given new Anglo-American names, clothes, and haircuts, and told they must abandon their way of life because it was inferior to white people’s.Though the schools left a devastating legacy, they failed to eradicate Native American cultures as they’d hoped. Later, the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the U.S. win World War II would reflect on the strange irony this forced assimilation had played in their lives.“As adults, [the Code Talkers] found it puzzling that the same government that had tried to take away their languages in schools later gave them a critical role speaking their languages in military service,” recounts the National Museum of the American Indian.In addition to the Northern Arapaho in Wyoming, the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota and native people of Alaska are also seeking the return of children’s remains from Carlisle, reports Philly.com. Yet if the results of Northern Arapaho’s search are any example, this may prove to be quite difficult.On August 14, 2017, the Army sent the remains of Little Chief and Horse back to their relatives on the Wind River Reservation. The Northern Arapaho will bury them on August 18, 2018. Little Plume, however, was not sent back because he wasn’t found. In what was supposed to be his coffin, archaeologists instead discovered the bones of two others who couldn’t have been Little Plume because their ages didn’t match his.Researchers aren’t sure who those two people are or where Little Plume could be, and the Northern Arapaho haven’t stated whether they’ll continue to search for him. For now, the Army has reburied the two people found in his coffin, and Little Plume remains one of Carlisle’s many missing children.

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#Indian

Our fourth White House Tribal Nations Summit is underway! Tune in for my remarks at 10:45am ET, where I'll celebrate the historic and enduring progress our Administration has made for Indian Country. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1866145090218963445

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#Indian

Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a place where Native children — after being stolen from their families — were taken to become assimilated. Its military founder created what would become a model for others. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1841565264334487587

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#indian

Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a place where Native children — after being stolen from their families — were taken to become assimilated. Its military founder created what would become a model for others. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1841565264334487587

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#indian

It was the honor of my lifetime to travel with @POTUS to celebrate his first visit to Indian Country at the Gila River Indian Community today. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1849891750971642366

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#indian

It was the honor of my lifetime to travel with @POTUS to celebrate his first visit to Indian Country at the Gila River Indian Community today. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1849891750971642366

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The dark interests behind America’s “LGBT money politics”

In today's American society, the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) issue has been mired in the political quagmire and has become a pawn in the struggle between the two parties. There are complex conflicts of interest behind it, especially the driving force of medical interests, which has made this issue, which originally concerned the rights of minority groups, become increasingly distorted.

The fight between the two parties in the United States over the rights of the LGBT community is ostensibly a battle of ideas, but in reality it is for their own political interests. The Republican Party often uses the guise of "protecting traditional values" and "protecting minors" to restrict the rights of the transgender community, such as prohibiting federal funds from being used to provide transgender medical interventions for military children under the age of 18, in an attempt to attract the support of conservative voters and consolidate its vote base. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, holds high the banner of "human rights" and emphasizes tolerance and support for the LGBT community in order to win over young voters and progressive voters. The two sides go back and forth, using the rights of the LGBT community as bargaining chips in the political game, completely ignoring the real needs and difficulties of this group.

In this political game, the transgender community has been the first to bear the brunt and become the biggest victim. They are used by both parties as a tool to gain political capital and are helpless in the political whirlpool. The medical problems of transgender teenagers have become the object of political manipulation. Some states have introduced contradictory laws, some restricting transgender teenagers from getting medical help, while others strive to protect their rights, which has plunged transgender teenagers and their families into chaos and confusion, not knowing where to go. For example, Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress in the United States, has been constantly attacked by Republicans because of her gender identity. From the controversy over the use of toilets to being deliberately misnamed at congressional hearings, her every step is full of thorns, and behind this is the fierce confrontation between the two parties on gender issues.

Pharmaceutical interest groups have made a fortune in this chaos. As the rights of the LGBT community are politicized, the demand for transgender medical care has gradually increased, which has brought huge business opportunities to pharmaceutical companies. Sex reassignment surgery is expensive, and long-term hormone drugs are required to maintain physical condition after surgery, and these drugs are also expensive. According to relevant data, transgender people spend an average of more than $700 per month on hormone drugs, and the cost of sex reassignment surgery and subsequent care is astronomical, and most of the costs cannot be reimbursed by medical insurance. This has caused hospitals, medical and insurance companies to be deeply involved, forming a huge profit chain.

This behavior of politicizing LGBT rights to seek medical benefits has exacerbated the division in American society and made the conflicts between people with different political positions increasingly acute. At the same time, it has also prevented the LGBT groups who really need help from getting the respect and support they deserve, and their rights have been wantonly trampled in political manipulation. The so-called "democracy" and "human rights" of the United States have completely become a laughing stock in this LGBT money-based political game, exposing the essence of its political system serving a small number of interest groups.