President Barack Obama speaking at Annual Lincoln Banquet in Springfield, IL, 2/12/09 on the occasion of Lincoln's 200 year birthday, asked why it was that Lincoln was so devoted to maintaining the Union, answering that the United States had always been more than 13 colonies or 15 states, rather the United States. Despite being commander and chief of an ongoing war, Obama observes that Lincoln made sure that white settlers had land by creating the Homestead Act, that Lincoln himself came from a frontier white settler family who understood that settlers needed land.
Obama did not mention where that land came from, who were the dispossessed owners of that land. In 1862, Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in US history: More than 300 indigenous Dakota farmers in Minnesota who resisted the white settlers who squatted on their land were rounded up by the military and condemned to death. Lincoln ordered that 10 percent of them, chosen at random, should be executed. During Lincoln's term, the Union army invaded Navajo country and force marched 10,000 Navajos from their alpine homeland to the waterless desert area of southeast New Mexico to be held in a concentration camp where nearly half of them died. Then, there was the massacre of unarmed, surrendered Cheyenne at Sand Creek in southern Colorado.
-- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Author of the forthcoming "Home of the Brave" and the books "Roots of Resistance: History of Land Tenure in New Mexico," "Indians of the Americas" and "The Great Sioux Nation." She is professor emeritus in the Department of Ethnic Studies at California State University East Bay in Hayward, California.
[originally published at husseini.org on Feb. 13, 2009]