This past weekend, President Trump repeatedly threatened to target Iranian cultural sites should Iran respond to his administration’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani. (And on Tuesday, Iran did just that, even as the president walked back his threats.) As noted by my colleague Matt Ford, the intentional destruction of such cultural sites would be a war crime deserving of impeachment and prosecution in the Hague, not that Trump much cares. The threat was deemed “grotesque” by Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins, who wrote that attacking sites like Persepolis would place America on “the same ethical plane as the Islamic State.”



Both Ford and Jenkins are correct about the obscenity of the threats, but as any Native citizen can likely attest, the if proposition here—the idea that the United States might cross a line that it hasn’t just yet—is grounded in an alternate reality. America has already engaged in this type of destruction. Was built on it, in fact.

Chaco Canyon. The Black Hills. Bears Ears. Gaylor Ranch. Standing Rock. Mauna Kea. Oak Flat. America, through its founding to its present, has stretched its borders and lined its pockets by desecrating Native American sacred and cultural sites and the land they sat on. A failure to reckon with this history would be a failure to properly contextualize the president’s current threats and America’s founding ethos of capitalist imperialism.

Itching to steal land from the Great Sioux Reservation, Dakota’s Yankton Press printed the following call to break the Fort Laramie Treaty—which created the sprawling reservation, secured the Black Hills for the tribes, and stipulated that the American military would abandon its posts and forts on the land and hold accountable any citizens who violated the treaty—in an 1868 column: “The Indians can make no use of the country which has been set apart for them. The pine lands and mineral deposits are of no value to them, because they neither have the knowledge or inclination to utilize them,” the newspaper declared. “The government owes it to the country, and particularly to Dakota, to remove every obstacle to the immediate opening up and development of this vast field of untold and incalculable wealth.”

Six decades later, having stolen and developed Paha Sapa (the Black Hills in Lakota), beyond recognition, Congress contracted a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer to travel north and blast the faces of four white men into the side of the Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe (Six Grandfathers), one of the sacred sites in the Black Hills, which are central to the Lakota creation story. Two of the men whose faces were carved into the stone were slavers, one was an unabashed Manifest Destiny idealist who gleefully spoke of killing Native people, and one was a president who willingly broke a legally binding treaty, starved out all of the Dakota people, and then hung 38 of them for having the gall to fight back. This, perhaps, was what the Press imagined as making use of the country.