In a December 1862 letter to the Senate, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of 39 Sioux citizens. In 1851, the Santee Sioux had ceded the land known as Minnesota to the United States in a pair of treaties, in exchange for a constant supply of services and wares to be provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Like countless treaties signed by the U.S., the agreements were not honored. Corruption consumed the BIA, and basic food items were subject to price gouging. And so, on the brink of starvation in the early winter of 1862, several hundred Sioux raided white towns and villages, looking for the rations that the government had stolen from them and that the colonizers had previously refused to trade with them.

If one is to believe the historians, Lincoln’s decision to impose 39 death penalties for the Sioux Uprising was one of delicate political balance: He had to kill enough Native resisters so as to stifle any future uprisings but not so many that he provoked another. Thirty-nine was the number he landed on after reviewing the transcripts, down from the 303 execution requests made by the military leaders in Minnesota. His letter to the Senate simultaneously served as both the largest mass execution order and the largest clemency order in U.S. history. Ultimately, 38 Sioux were hanged by the neck until death for having the gall to try to keep their people alive. As they stood atop the trap door, with nooses waiting to deliver the final snap, the condemned men spoke their names and cried out “I’m here! I’m here!”

Ten months later, Lincoln signed another letter. This one was a proclamation: As of October 3, 1863, the president, hoping to bring a symbolic sense of calm and joy to a nation torn in two by the still-raging Civil War, declared the fourth Thursday in November to be “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” Never mind the true history of the day Lincoln sought to memorialize, which, aside from its first peaceable but fragile iteration, had twice commemorated the slaying of Wampanoags in battle. Like the 38 Sioux, that was lost to the past: All that mattered was what the living told themselves and their children.

If you grew up going to public school in this country, you probably don’t recall much, if anything, about Lincoln’s execution order. In the long run, it was hardly exceptional for the U.S., save for how many Native lives it doomed, and even that figure was dwarfed by an endless number of massacres and “battles,” carried out by the military, private companies, and citizens. It was business as usual for a young nation with imperialist desires, with a touch of faux mercy to make it go down smoother for a president who would preside over the forced removal of the Navajo and Pueblo people and the Sands Creek Massacre of 1864. In truth, Lincoln, like many who would follow him, was not so different in practice from the more notoriously Native-hating Andrew Jackson: another chief executive who cared little for or about the Indigenous people he shared a continent with. But American textbooks only have room for so many villains.

It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our American society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.

Just a little over 100 years after Lincoln signed the first Thanksgiving proclamation, these words by Felix Cohen appeared quoted in the opening to the 1969 Kennedy Report on Indian Education. The report was helmed by Senator Ted Kennedy and serves as a bedrock document in the Native education and political communities: For the first time, possibly ever, it signaled that major U.S. political players were finally paying attention to the erasure of Native communities from the American mosaic. As part of the report, a review of 100 educational texts taken from public schools across the country came to the belated conclusion that Native people were viewed as little more than “subhuman wild beasts in the path of civilization.”