Bury My Heart: Genocide in the Family

Bury My Heart
Genocide in the Family
Jim Kavanagh

Burial of Native American dead at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, 1891.

Here’s Pete Hegseth’s impassioned rant, announcing his decision, “without hesitation,” that the soldiers from the “Battle” of Wounded Knee “deserve those medals” they received “for their actions,” that their “place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate” and that we “honor their service” and “will never forget what they did.”

I am, as anyone with an ethical cell in their brain should be, disgusted by the triumphal praise for an event that, per Britanica, “investigations and eyewitness accounts clearly established …as a massacre.” That is not, and since the day it happened has not been, “up for debate.”

The Wounded Knee incident occurred as the final act in America’s betrayal of treaties and destruction of Native American life and culture was playing out in a region where the Lakota tribes were already the victims of “forced assimilation” and “pushed to the brink of starvation.” A Miniconjou Lakota camp had agreed to “surrender without resistance” to the U.S. Army.  On December 28, 1890, the camp was surrounded by a 7^th Cavalry detachment commanded by Colonel James W. Forsyth and its people were relinquishing their weapons, when a deaf Lakota’s gun accidentally went off. The soldiers opened fire with Hotchkiss guns that fired 50 two-pound shells per minute, and mowed down between 250 and 300 Lakota, almost half of whom were women and children. Those who were able to evade that fire were cut down by mounted soldiers. As Britannica says, “The 7^th Cavalry did not discriminate.” 25 U.S. soldiers also died, many to friendly fire.

The commander of U.S. Army forces on Lakota territory, Major General Nelson A. Miles, was, unlike Pete Hegseth, “appalled” and tried to strip Forsyth of his command.

It’s a case of If this isn’t a massacre, nothing is, and in no circumstance is it any kind of action to “honor.” Hegseth is right that nobody has, or will, forget what they did.

Family Affair

But, beyond Wounded Creek, Hegseth’s rant struck a particular nerve with me.

Some years ago, I reconnected with a cousin—a second cousin, once removed—in Chevy Chase, whose family home I used to visit as a kid.  On a shelf in his apartment, I saw, in its wood-framed display case, a Congressional Medal of Honor. Impressed, I asked him who had won that, and he told me that it had been awarded to his "uncle-in-law” or “great-uncle-in-law,” Frederick Platten—a name I had never heard and bore no resemblance to any names I knew in our extended family. He then said, to my astonishment, that it was an object that Platten was ashamed of, and told me the story that Frederick Platten handed down, which I will relate after showing the official citation from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society website:

 

So, according to the official citation, Sgt. Platten “broke the resistance” of “an entrenched Cheyenne position” by sneaking up behind it with five other men.

This is not an account that screams “Congressional Medal of Honor” to me. But Federick Platten’s own account of what actually happened is even more disturbing. I will relate it to the best of my knowledge, based on notes I took after visiting my cousin.

Platten said that he had been sent to retrieve the body of a dead soldier. When he arrived at the scene of the soldier’s death, he either came upon, or was come upon by, two Cheyenne—one with a rifle, the other with a bow-and-arrow. He shot the one with the rifle first, then the other one. When he got back to base and told his Lieutenant, the Lieutenant praised him and said he would recommend him for a Medal of Honor. (It was the Lieutenant who wrote the fictional narrative for the citation.) The Lieutenant then ordered his squad to attack and massacre a Cheyenne village ("like My Lai," as my cousin put it), specifically ordering the killing of every inhabitant. Either before setting off, or at the scene of the attack on the village, Platten refused a direct order to kill women and children, saying "I don't do that." For this refusal, that Lieutenant or another officer brought him to a court-martial, which dismissed the case. Patten always told his family that he was prouder of the court-martial than of the Medal of Honor.

Thus, I discovered a distant, not direct bloodline but extended family involvement in the gruesome history of Native American genocide, which the Army now calls the “Indian Campaign.” (When I first looked this up, it was called the “Indian Wars”—-a not-as-coy, but equally false designation I think Hegseth would prefer.) The details of this passed-down story are not precise, though I don’t doubt the most important points, which are so terribly emblematic of American warfare history: A 26-year-old Irish immigrant soldier, enlisted in an American army protecting settler expansion, kills one armed and one semi-armed indigenous man and is then ordered, but refuses, to participate in the slaughter of the whole population of an indigenous village. As good a version as you’ll get of the intrinsically compromised American “warrior.”

And a sharp reminder to me that it’s all in the family.

The strangest element in the story is Sgt. Platten being both recommended for a Medal of Honor and put up for court-martial. But that confusion is precisely a telling mark of the ethical fault and contradiction underlying the entire “Indian Campaign,” which extends throughout scores of such incidents. In the Wounded Knee case, the general in charge was so “appalled” at the massacre that he tried to relieve the on-scene colonel of his command, while, at the same time, nineteen soldiers were—-based on officers’ recommendations—-awarded Medals of Honor for their “actions.” This kind of “appalling honor” schizophrenia has been a constituent, continuous element of America’s mass historical denegation regarding its foundational crimes. What better way to deny what you know is so bad than to insist on how good it is. It's a testimony to the criminal nature of that military history that the first Medal of Honor was awarded during the “Apache Wars” of 1861, and that “Indian Campaigns” account for the highest number of Medals of Honor (426) apart from the Civil War (1522) and World War II (464).

Who’s a more beloved president than Abraham Lincoln, who personally authorized the largest mass execution in American history—-of 38 Dakota men who fought in the US-Dakota “War” that was triggered by the “starvation and displacement” of the Dakota people? Glory, glory, Hallelujah.

So, now we have a resolution from both houses of the U.S. Congress (passed in1991) formally expressing "deep regret" for the Wounded Knee Massacre and a bill introduced twice (in 2019 and 2025) to “Remove the Stain” by rescinding the medals given to the soldiers for their “action,” and we have the Secretary of Defense War “hono[ring]  their service” in that he calls the Battle of Wounded Knee.

One way or another, we will, and should, never—-and my second cousin once removed’s uncle-in-law’s Congressional Medal of Honor won’t let me—-forget.

 

Blood Brothers

It’s impossible to write this today without thinking and saying something about the parallels with the genocide that the United States and its ward state, Israel, are perpetrating now on the Palestinian people—-displacement, starvation, and all. It’s impossible not to think of all the liberals and progressives who buried their sympathetic hearts with the Native Americans as soon as they learned about Wounded Knee, but hardened them to the Palestinians even when they knew for decades about the Nabka, and Deir Yassin, and Tantura, and Lydda, and Gaza, and Gaza, and Gaza again and again.

This is especially so, since an argument that Zionists love to snap out in favor of their Manifest Destiny—-as if it’s a killing rhetorical blow, packed with irrefutable historical realism—-is some version of: “So what, you’re a genocidal settler-colonizer, too. American Indians!” Gotcha!.

Here's how I’ve already addressed how phony that is, in a previous article:

It baffles me that anyone thinks that’s an effective argument.  My reply, after confirming that the speaker is unambiguously admitting that the relationship between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs today is ethico-politically analogous to that between European settlers and Native Americans from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, would go something like the following.

Yes, the U.S. and virtually every nation-state that came into being before the mid-twentieth century rests on a legacy of war, conquest, and injustice. 

And, yes, it’s hard to think of a worse colonial genocide than that visited on Native Americans from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Those facts are hardly enough to support the analogy as intended, however. First of all, being historically realist and all, we have to recognize that, tragically, over those four centuries, the Native American population was so completely ravaged that it now constitutes less than 1% of the population. If Native Americans were now the majority of the population in North America under white settler control; if they were engaged in a fierce resistance struggle in order to prevent being expelled or exterminated; if they had the support of hundreds of millions of their neighbors, as well as of populations and powerful governments throughout the world, as well as of an established international ideological and legal framework that forbade and denounced the colonial project the white settlers were still trying to complete (while demanding that everyone recognize America as the White Man's State)—then you would have a relevant analogy.

Furthermore, it’s not the fifteenth-to-nineteenth, but the twentieth-into-twenty-first century that we’re talking about. My country was also, as I recall, founded on centuries of slavery, a practice that was acceptable to many Western minds for centuries.  Does any liberal-minded Westerner today think it would be OK to establish or perpetuate a polity based on slavery?  To let just one more slip by, because, well, so many people have done it before and this is the last one, promise?

Sorry, but It doesn’t matter because someone else did it at some other time is a shallow, specious historicism. Isn’t what we learn from history, precisely, what should never happen again? I can’t stop the slave ships, or give the island I am living on back to the Manhattoes, but I can learn from history that it’s necessary to support today’s struggles against the New Jim Crow in my country, and the fight against the ongoing, unfinished colonial subjugation of Palestine that my country is enabling. That, I think, is how to historicize.

So, yes, there are historical lines that are often drawn under past injustices that cannot be reversed. The point—what Gaza shows—is that the fate of the Palestinians is not one of them; it is an ongoing struggle-in-progress that is nowhere near finished, and that calls on us to take responsibility, not excuses, from history.

I have a familial connection with that, too—-closer, more contradictory, and more poignant, which I’ll relate as I remember it (some siblings’ memories may differ). When my father, who had a rare blood type, was sick in St Vincent’s hospital in 1969, he received a blood donation. He did not survive. A few days after he died, my mother received a gift from the man who had donated his blood. The man had contacted the hospital, found out the sad result for the man whose life he had wanted to save, and graciously extended his condolences with a gift to the widow. That gift, from that nice Jewish man, my father’s blood brother, was a framed certificate certifying that a tree had been planted in my father’s name in a park in Israel.

It was many years later that I understood that tree was almost certainly planted over the ruins of one of the hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns that were levelled to the ground in the Zionist ethnic cleansing of 1948—-part of a Jewish National Fund “greenwashing” project to erase any traces of Palestinian presence and make European settlers feel comfortable and at home.

That man, like Sgt. Frederick Platten, did a good thing in the middle of a very bad thing. And I, like my second cousin once removed, carry around the token of that good and bad thing, on a shelf in my mind and heart.

And yes, Pete, we will never, and can never, forget what they did—-everything that they did. It is all in the family.

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