What's in a name
Pentagon weapons defame Indigenous peoples
By
Monica Moorehead
The United States has developed an insidious racist habit of
using names associated with Indigenous culture to sell
commodities for profit and to spread chauvinism. For example,
everyone has heard of the Washington Redskins, Cleveland
Indians and Florida State Seminoles. Tragically, these teams'
names and others reflect the fact that Native peoples have been
reduced to the status of mere mascots and "noble images" in a
land they inhabited in peace and harmony before Christopher
Columbus invaded in 1492.
The U.S. government does very little about the stark reality
that Native communities suffer the highest unemployment,
alcohol and drug addiction, school drop-outs and infant
mortality of any nationality.
Fortunately, there have been heroic organizing efforts to
counter the racist, stereotypical abuse of Native culture.
Native-led organizations like the National Coalition on Racism
in Sports and Media and its allies have held many protests at
sports events to expose this injustice to the masses.
NCRSM is now focusing attention on the same issue, but in
another arena. That arena is the Pentagon, home of the military
arm of U.S. imperialism.
In 1946 the U.S. Army passed a regulation called "Assigning
Popular Names" that led to Bell Aircraft naming its H-13
helicopter the Sioux. The regulation stated that army aircraft
can be named after "Indian terms and names of American Indian
tribes and chiefs" to show the "mobility, agility, flexibility,
firepower and endurance" of the equipment.
This was the Pentagon's way of "honoring" the same Native
nations that its predecessor, the U.S. Cavalry, slaughtered in
the millions to open up the West to capitalist expansion.
Today, the Pentagon has an arsenal of Boeing AH-64A Apache
helicopters, as well as other helicopters with Native names
such as Chinook, Black Hawk and the Kiowa. This is just the tip
of the iceberg.
In April, Clinton ordered a battalion of $12 million-plus
Apache helicopters to Kosovo. It is very ironic that weapons
named for Indian peoples who were ethnically cleansed by the
United States are being sent abroad to fight in a supposed
anti-"ethnic-cleansing" campaign in Yugoslavia.
A number of Native leaders are speaking out against using
Native culture to glorify imperialist war. Vernon Bellecourt, a
member of the White Earth Ojibwe nation and the president of
NCRSM, remarked in a June 7 New Yorker article about the Black
Hawk helicopters: "The name is used in a generic way and it
creates this impression that all we did was go around
fighting.
"Black Hawk was a great leader, a man of peace. He was a
victim of the most horrendous ethnic cleansing. To reduce this
great leader to a gunship or a hockey team is absolutely
outrageous."
Moonanum James, a co-leader of United American Indians of
New England and a member of the Wampanoag nation, told Workers
World: "What the U.S government is doing to our heroic Native
leaders is no different from what they do to other
revolutionary figures fighting for national liberation. For
example, this government was behind the assassination of
African American hero Malcolm X. But 34 years after his death,
they put out a stamp to `honor' him. What is that but blatant
co-opting and exploitation?
"There were huge bounties put on the heads of Apaches, who
were demonized for taking up weapons to defend their lands from
foreign occupiers," James explained. "For the Pentagon to place
Native names on weapons of mass destruction to exterminate
other poor and oppressed peoples to preserve the so-called
American way of life is a disgusting insult to all those
struggling for social justice."
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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