To celebrate Native American Heritage Month, the Pentagon has gone all out with ceremonies across the United States, from an Air Force-sponsored intertribal powwow in Florida to a celebration of Native American aircraft nose art in Oregon.

The military has also been pumping out feel-good stories about Native American troops: one South Dakota National Guardsman from the Oglala Sioux tribe was allowed to grow out his hair, and an Air National Guardsmen from the District of Columbia who belongs to four different tribes reflected in his Lakota, Seneca, Navajo, and Comanche heritage.

The top official involved in the commemorations, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, gave a speech calling this month “a time to remember the achievements of indigenous peoples throughout our nation’s history” and proceeded to begin that history with a reference to the Navajo “Code Talkers,” who used their native language to create an unbreakable code for U.S. Marines during World War II.

There is, however, quite a bit of history that Hicks’s historical timeline skips: roughly 170 years of armed attacks, forced relocations, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide of Native Americans carried out by the U.S. military.

“Acknowledging Native veterans and Native contributions is terrific. And there are a lot of proud Native veterans. But it’s one of those gestures that is nice in theory but is, perhaps, meant to whitewash how we understand Native American history and how Native Americans ended up in the place that we did,” said Keith Richotte Jr., the director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona. “It doesn’t really address the fact that there was this longer history in which military violence was critical to the subjugation of Native peoples and maintaining the colonial project. It ignores the military’s efforts in the late 18th and 19th centuries to essentially destroy tribes, tribal nations, and tribalism.”

Another expert on the topic put it more bluntly.

“The Army was, bottom line, an instrument of a settler colonial empire that was determined to convert Native lands into private property for mostly white settlers,” said Jeffrey Ostler, professor of history emeritus at the University of Oregon and author of “Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States From the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.” “That was its mission: to carry out a federal government policy that, in practice, often became a genocidal war.”

The U.S. Army, formed in 1775, fought alongside and against Native Americans from its very founding.

This appears to be a mealy-mouthed reference to the fact that the Oneida Homelands were estimated at about between five to six million acres of land at the end of the Revolutionary War, but following a raft of federal and New York state treaties and rulings were reduced to 32 acres by the early 1900s. (The Pentagon did not reply to a request to interview the author of the piece.)

The nascent U.S. military was less generous to Native Americans who didn’t join their colonial rebellion and sided with the British.

In 1779, George Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign to bring about the “total ruin” of Six Nations settlements across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania and New York. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops,” read the orders sent to Maj. Gen. John Sullivan. “Our future security will be in their inability to injure us the distance to which they are driven and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire.” When the operation was over, Sullivan’s army had destroyed more than 40 villages and at least 160,000 bushels of corn.

The Pentagon’s celebratory articles about Native Americans’ cheerful service in the U.S. military and glaring historical gaps are further undermined by more accurate information available — if tucked away — on the U.S. Army Center of Military History’s own website.

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