What Does Truth in American History Look Like?

“History is a set of lies agreed upon,” —Napoleon Bonaparte.

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Disclaimer: As a Native person and a descendant of two original nations and peoples of this Turtle Island continent, I have not written this piece to cheer for the red team, the blue team, or any “team” in American politics for that matter. The context for this essay is, once again, the free existence of our nations and peoples extending back to the beginning of our time, contrasted with the code of domination that was expressed in “official” christian european documents and imposed on everyone and everything in our part of Mother Earth, and elsewhere on this gorgeous planet.

That contrast leads to the insight that we are able to imagine the view-from-the-shore of our Native ancestors looking out toward the ships sailing westward toward them, and the colonizers’ view-from-the-ship with the assumptions, intentions and mindset they were carrying. This essay offers a view-from-the-shore perspective on an important issue about truth, history, and the construction of reality.

Note: For those of you who are new to this Substack, my domination translator involves placing [“domination”], or some variation thereof, in brackets after a synonym for domination.

~SN~

On March 27, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The eminent historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote, “Experience is another name for history.” The massive scope of what was experienced and continues to be experienced beneath title “the founding and life of the United States of America” is encompassed in the concept of “truth” in American history.

By the title of his March 27th executive order, President Trump framed the issue of historical truth as, at least in part, a matter of “sanity,” meaning “soundness of health of mind.” In the past this was called “mental hygiene.” The title also presumes that “the state” [of domination] knows what’s sane and insane and whether a particular person matches the idea of “sanity.”

Trump’s use of the word “sanity” creates a context and potential for accusing people that the Trump administration considers heretics of history to be exhibiting signs of “insanity.” This is a “tried and true” technique. Accuse those you oppose politically or ideologically of being “crazy,” and then claim it’s a problem “the state” [of domination] must remedy.

This tactic was used against Native people with the creation of the “Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians” founded in Canton, South Dakota in the early 1900s. 350 people were confined there in terrible conditions. 121 died there. We could cite other such institutions.

Native people could be incarcerated at such a facility for arguing with the Indian agent, or for displaying behavior the government and medical officials deemed “insane,” such as not being properly submissive and compliant, or for being a medicine person.

For a comprehensive treatment of this part of Native history, I highly recommend Coyote’s Swing: A Memoir and Critique of Mental Hygiene in Native America (Washington State University Press, 2022), written by my friend Dr. David Walker.

One part of his focus addresses “reveals how the U.S. mental health system reframes Native American reactions to oppression and marginalization into ‘mental disorders’ and ‘mental illness’." Of particular note is chapter fourteen, “Entering the Asylum,” and the opening section “Mental Hygiene As Thought Reform.”

The word sanity is derived from the Latin sanitus, meaning “health.” It is closely related to sanitation, “a rendering sanitary, or healthy,” and “use of sanitary measures.”

A government [system of domination] or a government institution engages in a process of “sanitizing” history when it authorizes its representatives to “clean-up” a historical narrative. Notice, by the way, that the word “author” is embedded in “authorities” and “authorized.” Government officials use the written word to author the version of reality officially authorized. Why? Because words shape and create the reality we experience.

A “cleansing” of the authored historical record is accomplished by editing out, redacting, or destroying the bad and heinous stuff. Just think of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, along with “Black Sites,” “extraordinary renditions” and “secret detentions.” A sanitizing of that historical record occurred in 2005 when the C.I.A. destroyed videotapes of the torturous interrogation techniques it applied to terrorism suspects in Iraq.

When “negative” information is removed from public displays, such as signage we find in museums, the public is prevented from focusing on such events or deeds. Such a removal of information, especially if it is accurate and truthful, is a way of preventing a disclosure of the covert shadow side, and criminality of the American political experiment. Negative narratives are replaced by positive sounding wording such as “the history of America’s greatness.”

A powerful book that deals with the effort to craft historical narratives for purposes of power (either gaining or maintaining it) is Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995).

A Haitian historian, Trouillot insightfully says that “the ultimate challenge” to power, may be “the exposition of its roots.” The conceptual roots of “America” trace back to patterns of domination in Vatican papal bulls, and ideas such as christian dominators (“dominorum christianorum”) extending domination (“dominio”) where it does not yet exist.

The U.S.’s roots of domination with regard to Native nations and peoples are made evident by the claiming of the entirety of the geographical space where those nations and peoples were living a free way of life on islands and continents.

There are innumerable examples of oppression that can be cited, but some of them include the Sand Creek Massacre, the Wounded Knee Massacre, the genocidal campaign waged against the Indians of California, and the effort to destroy our accustomed way of life on our own lands as Original Nations and Peoples.

We are also able to point out the stealing and torturing of Native of Native children in an inter-generational campaign waged to destroy our memories, which our ancestors encoded in our languages, cultures, and ceremonial traditions. The forced sterilization of Native women to prevent births among our peoples in the 1970s is another example.

Perhaps Trump wants to carry out a campaign to induce amnesia in the public consciousness as a way of “cleansing” (sanitizing) the national memory of the United States about such crimes and misdeeds. A society cannot learn from its mistakes or intentional misdeeds if it lives in denial of those parts of its past and present.

For me Trump’s executive order calls to mind Pope John Paul II’s call for the “purification of memory.” During his papacy the pope said the Catholic Church needed to purify its memory. In 1998, the Vatican issued a pamphlet titled, “The Church and Racism: Toward a More Fraternal Society.” I received a copy from Archbishop Silvano Tomasi at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in 2016. The pamphlet states in part:

“There are situations where the evil done survives the person who has done it, through the consequences of certain actions, and can become a burden weighing on the conscience and memory of later generations. A purification of memory then becomes necessary.” (original emphasis) “Purifying memory means eliminating from personal and collective conscience all forms of resentment or violence left by the inheritance of the past . . .” As the classic Italian saying goes, “Fuhgeddaboudit!”

As if what’s needed is a big public announcement: “Clean-up on aisle 6, in the memory department.” As per his executive order, perhaps President Trump could create his very own “Narrative Sanitation Corps” to “clean up” the wording of historical markers and museum displays, to silence and attempt to hide certain aspects of America’s past, the aftermath of which are still present.

When President Trump says he desires “truth and sanity” in American history, we may assume that his version of “sanity” will be achieved by only focusing upon historical information that does not cast the United States in a negative light. Section 4 of his presidential executive order is titled “Restoring Truth in American History.”

In that fourth section, the Secretary of the Interior is directed to “focus [solely?] on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people” as well as the “natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” And while they’re at it, I’m sure they’ll make certain no one focuses on the fact that those so-called “public lands” “of America” are ill-gotten gains wrenched away from Native nations and peoples, over which the United States now asserts a claimed right of domination. Is it too divisive and mentally unhygienic to mention this?

Trump’s executive order provides the opportunity for the U.S. government to use the accusation of “improper ideology” to claim that certain historical narratives are “divisive,” and fail to properly focus on the “achievements and progress” of the United States.

Given Trump’s executive order, I wonder: Will my domination framework of analysis be deemed an “ideology” that is “improper” because it focuses on the historical and present-day fact of the United States’ system of domination?

Is it going to be deemed “improper” to point out the patterns we have spent decades documenting? Will we be considered to lack “mental hygiene” because we have documented how those patterns have been woven into the institutional fabric of the United States, as demonstrated by the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court website, and the entire body of ideas and arguments called “federal Indian law,” which my dear friend Peter d’Errico calls Federal Anti-Indian Law (Praeger, 2023)?

Truth means “that which is true” and “that which conforms to fact or reality,” but in a specific context and from a given perspective.

As I mentioned at the outset, we as Native people have a view-from-the-shore perspective, looking out at the invasive ships sailing toward our Native ancestors. We are thinking about what ensued before and after the invaders’ landfall. This is our context. Our perspective results in our truthful version of our experience (history) of interacting with the body politic of the United States.

Our ancestors didn’t arrive here on some christian european ship. They were already here on this Turtle Island continent when those ships arrived.

The Trump administration is apparently only interested in focusing on the “achievements and progress” of the United States. Does President Trump intend to strike a balance between those who want to be celebratory about the United States of America and those of us who intend to hold the United States to account for an ongoing American system of domination?

In the active precedent of Johnson v. McIntosh, the U.S. Supreme Court declares the U.S. system of domination (which it calls “ultimate dominion”) to be “the law of the land” which “cannot be questioned.” 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823) at 591.

Powerful documentation of the U.S.’s track record is found in David Vine’s, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, From Columbus to the Islamic State (University of California Press, 2020).

Vine begins by saying there is “no easy answer to why the United States—or, more accurately, its government [domination] and its military [domination]—has been fighting almost without pause since independence.”

He takes a somewhat different approach: “Rather than looking primarily at the wars themselves,” he writes, “this book looks at the infrastructure [of domination] that made the wars possible.” He adds, “this book uses military bases as windows to understand the pattern of endless U.S. wars [domination].”

What President Trump calls “the history of American greatness” is a result of those “endless U.S. wars” first against our Native nations and peoples, and then as a means of expanding American domination around the globe. This has been true from the beginning, as the American empire extended its sway (domination) across the lands of our Original Nations in the east and then moved westward. Vine reminds us:

“From the United States’ earliest days, bases abroad have played key roles in launching and maintaining U.S. wars and other military actions. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hundreds of Army forts beyond U.S. borders launched dozens of wars against Native American peoples, resulting in the conquest [domination] of lands across North America and the deaths of millions [as a result of domination].” Expanding on that information in the Introduction to his book, David Vine writes:

“In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the military-built bases farther from the North American mainland, in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, Panama, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. During World War II U.S. forces built and occupied two thousand base sites and a total of thirty thousand installations touching every continent.”

In case there is any doubt about the phenomenon of domination that I use “The Domination Chronicles” to highlight, I shall sum up by quoting President Trump’s own words during his last term in office as documentary evidence. During his commencement address to the graduating class of the Naval Academy on May 18, 2018, President Trump stated:

“We’re sharpening the fighting edge of everything from marine infantry squads to combat ships to deliver maximum lethal force [domination]. The enemy has to know we have that. And we are recommitting to this fundamental truth: We are a maritime nation. It’s true. And being a maritime nation, we’re surrounded by sea. We must always dominate [domination] that sea. We will always dominate [domination] the oceans.”

How far do “the oceans” extend? Across the entire planet.

When I use an original nations’ view-from-the-shore perspective to look at the historical record, I see the past and present-day manifestations of the Paradigm of Domination globally. I consider our efforts to bring that paradigm and its coding to light, while advocating on behalf of our Original Instructions and on behalf of all Life, to be an exercise in truth, sanity, and historical integrity. All Our Relations.