Veteran Warriors: America’s Most Unknown Soldiers

It struck me as odd this morning that while Civil War soldiers are counted among American veterans, I’ve never heard the original American-on-American war referenced on Memorial Day. That struggle began in the seventeenth century and continued into the late nineteenth, proceeding from east coast to west.

East of the Mississippi: The Pequot War, Creek War, the Seminole Wars and Tecumseh’s War. West of the Mississippi: “Indian Wars” that included the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Creek War of 1813-14, the Sioux Uprising of 1862, the Sand Creek Massacre and Wounded Knee.

Many Federal troops died, but of course many more Native American men, women and children perished. While the names of a handful of their great leaders are remembered, the names of ordinary warrior and civilian deaths went entirely unnoted by those who displaced them.

Native Americans lived here for over 10,000 years. We have a great deal to learn from what they died fighting for.

Because although the kind of balance with nature practiced by Native American cultures can’t be replicated, the kind of imbalance practiced by ours can’t be sustained.

“How can we buy the sky? How can you own the wind? The air is precious. It shares its spirit with all the life it supports. We did not weave the web of life. We are merely a strand in it. Wherever we do to the web, we do to ourselves"

- Chief Seattle, abridged remarks

“The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia.”

- National Geographic News