Yesterday was the 183rd anniversary of a forgotten event. Some kind soul (with the spirit of a historian who seeks to find and tell the truth) posted this:
For readers interested, Massacre Canyon is located in southwestern Nebraska; the memorial is located on US 34, just east of Trenton and a few miles west of McCook, Nebraska. This location is about 70 miles south of the Platte River. As the map below shows, this is well outside the boundaries of the Lakota Nation as that Nation agreed to in 1851’s Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States and other AmerInd nations. Twenty-two years earlier. (Massacre Canyon is actually south of the area shown on the map.
Why is this relevant to the Price of Liberty in 2026, 183 years later.
Because people and the groups that they operate want to change history. To support claims of victimhood, to claim reparations from people whom (generations later) had nothing to do with the events for which they demand restitution. Is restoration even possible? Consider these things.
Today, the LandBack movement, led by a radical group of a few enrolled Lakota tribal members, and supported by a lot of Woke haters and enemies of liberty, are trying to rewrite history. While they claim that all of Turtle Island (North America) constitutes “stolen land,” they are particularly lusting after what they claim is the rightful land and patrimony of the Lakota, which are one of the Seven Council Fires (that is, the Great Sioux Nation), stolen by the “Settlers” and the FedGov, using the US Army.
Indeed, they today claim far more than the 1851 treaty (as signed by the Lakota at the time):
But notice that even that map (with its bogus labels and false statements) does not show Massacre Canyon as being Lakota territory.
The point? The ancestors of modern Lakota citizens are guilty of exactly the same thing that they condemn then-American “settlers” and Congress for doing. They trespassed, they attacked another nation (the Pawnee) on that nation’s land, as invaders, without any justification except they were “enemies.” The Lakota of 1873 were behaving in exactly the same way as the US Army did in the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Battle of the Washita (1868) against the Lakota’s allies the Cheyenne, and against the Lakota at the Greasy Grass (Little Big Horn) in 1876 and at Wounded Knee (1890).
And today, these LandBack crazies claim territory that never belonged to the Lakota. More than half of that part of Nebraska they claim belonged to the Pawnee, Ponca, Ho Chunk, and other AmerInd nations. Many of those parts of Wyoming and Nebraska they claim belonged to the Cheyenne, Crow, and Arapaho, and even Blackfeet and Shoshone. Indeed, the huge camp of the Lakota and Cheyenne at Greasy Grass was trespassing on Crow territory, territory recognized in that 1851 treaty. The land claimed and demanded to be given back to the Lakota today includes both the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne Reservations in Montana.
But 150 years later, these Woke activists want to be declared the moral victors (and of course, victims) of colonialism and racism. Because, in the 21st Century States, those things sell. They are the sizzle, used to get stupid and gullible people to buy the slop and gutter scrapings offered.
Meanwhile, today, the Pawnee mostly live in Oklahoma, where they ultimately fled and were forced to go, because both the Lakota and the FedGov aggressed against them. (Though the Pawnee, like the Crow and the Shoshone, were allied with the hated Americans.)
Custer, MacKenzie, Harney, Crook, and others, and the troops they led, are rightly condemned for many of their actions. Actions directed by the US Congress, and executed by various presidents (including Abe Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and US Grant). But the blood drips off Lakota hands as well. The blood of men, women, and children. Of many “tribes” including (and not limited to) Arikara, Mandan, Cheyenne, Crow, Ponca, and Scandinavian, Latter-Day Saint, Anglo-American, Irish-American, and more.
We cannot change the past, and if we are to accept that restitution and reparations are to be paid, let us include all of those abused and defeated in the past: not just black (who may or may not, today, have ancestors who were slaves) and AmerInd people (who were often invaders, conquerors, and slavers). How about giving the Welsh back even a part of England “stolen” from them? Or in more modern times, how about returning East Prussia to Germany – both the Russian half and the Polish half? And give Poland back a chunk of what was stolen from them and given to Belarus. Or those parts of Greece stolen by Turkey a little more than a century ago.
Libertarians like to blame governments for all wars and conflicts, but governments are driven to do these things by the lusts of their leaders and often, those who are supposedly being led by them: whether it is hot-headed activists or young warriors or protesters, or business owners who are willing to let and get government to side them in exploiting others.
Matters like this cannot be solved by seeking revenge, even if that revenge is limited to once more stealing something from someone centuries later.