Rewriters of the Plains
9th September 2024
as a grinding tale of “indigenous resilience in the face of, and resistance to, the impositions of settler colonialism.” Under a three-year program to create a “national context narrative” on the Southern Plains Conflicts of 1864-1869, the agency will contract a group of writers to follow a pre-written script that will result in a politically-charged view of our past. This project should be stopped not just because it will distort Southern Plains history but also because it is an insult to a free society.
Leftists assailed the Trump Administration’s 20-member 1776 Commission, which produced a report on American history in 2021. But the Biden Administration’s institutionalization of official history within a state agency is far more nefarious. The 1776 Report was a one-off written by outsiders and having no official standing in government or education. The Southern Plains Conflicts report, on the other hand, is being managed by bureaucrats who work for the taxpayer, and it will be used as the official handbook for government operations, including tour guides, historical preservation, and, of course, grants to tribes. “The narrative will provide a framework of the US government’s policy towards Indigenous populations, and its support of American economic development and settlement west of the Mississippi River,” the program notes.
Most people associate officially-approved histories with the Soviet Union or Mao’s China. The state, we assume, should not be in the business of foisting its current political attitudes onto our understanding of the past. But our Scandinavian Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is never seen without native American jewelry to emphasize her indigenous bona fides, has made a point of doing just that.