Rant time. These Indian Wars historians put so much work into hunting down every source for their detailed accounts that cover every bit of minutia about what the US army was doing. But they never bother to mention that the US army was in invasion force.

They were invading sovereign territory, attacking villages full of women, children, & elders, & these historians make it sound as if American actions were completely reasonable. Indians are never fleshed out, while we get every detail of the slightest army activity.

Every time I read an article like this it bugs me. These histories are told in such a one-sided manner and in such a way that erases, glosses over, or condones violent American colonialism. Like other Indian Wars scholarship, it isn’t “bad,” it is just so one-sided.

Is it so hard to acknowledge Native sovereignty over their own land? Is it so hard to point out that the US had no reasonable justification for invading sovereign territory? Is it so hard to acknowledge that the US was & is a colonial nation with the motive to steal Native land?

I should point out that there is good work out there on the Indian Wars. There are scholars who do work from the Native perspective and grounded in Native Studies. It just seems that these type of articles outnumber them 20 to 1.