Far-right settler violence, repression of local resistance, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are not just the preserve of the modern Israeli state. Because the superpower ally fuelling its atrocities also has a long history of settler-colonial genocide against Native Americans. And political prisoner Leonard Peltier’s release after 50 years of unjust incarceration brings into focus the repression, death and destruction that has always been at the heart of the US project.
Leonard Peltier is now an elder of the Native American community, suffering from numerous health issues. But he continues to be a great example of resistance for Native Americans who have faced countless challenges during centuries of brutal European expansionism in their homeland. Now, amid new president Donald Trump’s shameless expansionist rhetoric (and after 15 months of Joe Biden’s contemptible support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza), the settler-colonial mentality of US elites is fully on display for all to see. And this naked arrogance should encourage us all to reflect and learn from the past. Because that’s the only way our resistance will have any chance of success.
Remembering the European settler genocide against Native Americans
History professor Donald L. Fixico highlights that the US government has authorised “over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids” on Native American people – “the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people”. Prominent events included the Gnadenhutten Massacre, the Battle of Tippecanoe, the Mvskoke Creek War, the Indian Removal Bill (leading to the “Trail of Tears”), the Mankato Executions, the Sand Creek Massacre, Custer’s Campaigns, and Wounded Knee.
Settlers of primarily Western European origin committed genocide against the local inhabitants. And a toxic ideology of “racial hatred and paranoia” made it “easy to paint Indigenous peoples as pagan savages who must be killed in the name of civilization and Christianity”. Settler actions had directly or indirectly killed millions of Native Americans by the end of the 19th century.
Some indigenous locals tried to (or pretended to) assimilate into the society of the settlers to avoid repression. And in a campaign of “cultural genocide”, the colonisers forced “thousands of Native American children to attend boarding schools”.
One Native American child who suffered the nightmare of boarding school was Leonard Peltier.
20th-century repression and the US’s longest standing political prisoner
The American Indian Movement (AIM) arose in the late 1960s to challenge “high unemployment, slum housing, and racist treatment”, fight for Native American rights and land, and to stand up for members of the community living in poverty in urban areas around the country. But the FBI and CIA quickly “set out to crush the movement”, inevitably causing confrontation. The FBI called it “extremist” and sought to “weaken the movement through infiltration, surveillance, and violence”, as it did with “many leftist and radical activist organizations” at the time. But AIM still had a big impact on the community.
A member of AIM, Peltier was sent to jail “over the 1975 killing of two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation”. He has long insisted on his innocence and, as Democracy Now! points out:
His conviction was riddled with irregularities and prosecutorial misconduct, and he is considered to be the longest-serving political prisoner in the United States.
In a surprising final act of his presidency, Joe Biden decided to release Peltier after 50 years in prison. The Native American leader’s legal team said the move “closes a chapter marked by profound injustice”. It also highlighted that “former federal prosecutor James Reynolds, whose office led Peltier’s case, admitted in a 2021 letter to Biden, the government failed to prove that Peltier personally committed any crime”.
Leonard Peltier against all settler-colonial genocide
Back in 1982, Leonard Peltier stressed his “solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for their traditional land”, insisting that:
The Israeli troops, in carrying out their genocidal campaign, are acting today as the 7th Calvary acted in the past and continues to act in Indian Country.
And perhaps revealing the spirit that scared US elites, Peltier asserted:
If I were free today, I would take our Red Warriors to fight side by side with the freedom fighters of the P.L.O. to smash the imperialist forces of the U.S. & Israel.
In 2024, amid Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, he wrote:
Settler colonialism is a disease. We are the antidote. I can’t stress this enough: EDUCATE.
He also asserted that:
Fascism has spread through those who have taken power and is staining the earth blood-red.
He added:
I have been caged for over 47 years because the government wanted to open Pine Ridge Reservation to uranium mining. Our people have suffered various forms of genocide for centuries. Poisoning our land, our water, the very air we breathed – it was just one more.
And referring to the naked brutality of the settler-colonial order, he insisted:
Civil rights used to be a pretense. They were never a true thing. Now, I see that the government is not bothering to pretend.
Trump: proud of US settler-colonial crimes
Donald Trump is no friend of Native Americans. In his first term, he removed federal protections for land and wildlife, pushing forward with nature-destroying projects and weakening consultation processes. He also oversaw attempts at indigenous voter suppression while happily using hateful and mocking language. And many Native Americans took notice of his record.
After four years of Biden being little better, Trump managed to convince some Native Americans to support him. But overall, they still leaned heavily towards the Democrats. And now, Trump is sticking two fingers up at them again. Because his pick for Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, not only has a record of not consulting with Native American communities, but has also smeared them and even “threatened to sue tribes that closed their reservation borders to protect their communities” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nine reservations banned her because of her behaviour. However, the Department of Homeland Security can “waive federal laws meant to protect tribes’ cultural, sacred and burial sites”, and has done so on numerous occasions.
An effective nationalist leader always tries to invoke an image of pride that people in a country can get behind. But rather than focus on only positive achievements, Trump has honed in on the dangerous myth of American exceptionalism, the colonial notion that the US is somehow the world’s ‘greatest nation’ and can therefore do what it wants and take what it wants. Among other things, it’s a concept that led to the genocide of Native Americans. But even this ideology included an arrogant aspect of ‘moral superiority’, an element that Trump doesn’t even try to pretend to care about. (To be fair, his Democratic opponents’ wholescale support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza hardly helped to stop the drastic descent into an ‘it’s ok to be immoral again’ doctrine.)
The violent imperial expansion continues, despite Leonard Peltier
The USA is a quintessential imperial power – a nation whose ruling elites enthusiastically terrorise opponents into submission to take control of land, resources, and power. And as author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz previously told the Canary:
The United States was founded as a white republic and white supremacy is baked into the constitution and institutions that exist today.
A “permanent culture of violence”, she said, lays at the heart of the US political system. And a “genocidal tendency is baked into the US armed forces”.
Trump has made his expansionist agenda nakedly clear, referencing the devastating doctrine of Manifest Destiny while speaking of power grabs in Panama, Greenland, the Gulf of Mexico, and even Mars. But the USA has always been about arrogant settler-colonial expansion. And it has always been about aggressively bullying others into submission.
Israel has attracted our full attention with its live-streamed 21st-century genocide in the last 15 months. But its whole settler-colonial project is simply a crude, viral remake of a story European powers had told long before, from the Americas to Australasia, and from Asia to Africa. As Peltier poignantly put it, “settler colonialism is a disease” and “we are the antidote”.
We need to learn from the past, and spread the word. Because only by understanding the enemy will we be able to defeat it.
Featured image via the Canary
