In 1962, the movie “How the West Was Won” premiered, starring John “Duke” Wayne, James “Jimmy” Stewart, Henry Fonda, and many other top-name actors of the time.

The movie, which was one of the most popular of its day, largely celebrated the “heroic” expansion across the country by European settlers, while depicting Native Americans as savages who attempted to stand in the way of their progress.  

The theme of Manifest Destiny runs throughout the film, rationalizing and justifying the killing of Native people and taking ownership of their land.

It has since been made public that both Wayne and Stewart were known racists embracing white supremacy to varying degrees.

Wayne’s infamous 1971 interview in Playboy magazine exposed his emboldened racist views regarding Blacks and Native Americans.

During the 1973 Academy Awards, Sacheen Littlefeather (a Native American actress and activist) delivered a speech on behalf of Best Actor Award recipient Marlon Brando, for his iconic role in “The Godfather.” Brando protested how Native Americans had been portrayed on screen by refusing the award.

Apparently, Wayne became so upset about her appearance on stage that he had to be restrained by 6 security personnel backstage. Littlefeather was subsequently booed by the audience and blackballed by the industry.    

Stewart was reportedly distrustful and discriminated against Blacks and Jewish people.

Fonda, on the other hand, had been forced by his father to witness the hanging of a Black man as a child, and watch while the man’s lifeless body was dragged behind a truck around the village square in Omaha, Nebraska. Traumatized by the event, it was an experience he never forgot, and led him to vehemently reject racism, according to his daughter Jane Fonda.  

All three men were a “product of their time,” but did not share the same worldview or adopt the same perspective when it came to racial issues. This has been the case throughout history, and using this as an excuse holds no water, as we all have a natural sense of right and wrong and the ability to treat others as we wish to be treated.

It wasn’t until 1993 that the documentary “How the West Was Lost” was brought to the screen for two seasons. Unlike its predecessor, it delivered the perspective of the Native Americans.

As the African proverb goes, “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be seen as the hero,” even if it means creating revisionist history.   

In the mode of white supremacy, all other cultures are deemed inferior and must be subservient to whiteness.

With this current administration, we are seeing attempts to turn back the clock and rewrite history to whitewash slavery and European expansion, while ignoring or downplaying the contributions of all other cultures.

Ignorance is the tool used to lock in white supremacist indoctrination. Banning books and taking control of the historical narrative of the youth through a tightly controlled educational system is a time-proven tactic.

When we view American history through the eyes of our Native American brothers and sisters, we see the pain of the Trail of Tears and tribal genocide. We see children torn away from their families and ushered into boarding schools to indoctrinate them into Eurocentric culture and language, inclusive of changing their names, dress, and denying their own rich contributions to civilization.

 Through the eyes of African Americans, we see similar experiences of being demonized and marginalized. We see the pain of rapes, the whip, the middle passage, the shackles, the harshness of enslavement, tortures and lynchings, Jim Crow Segregation, and loss of promised land, mass incarceration, and the list goes on, just as it does for any non-white demographic. The Mexicans, the Chinese, and the Japanese have all suffered at the hands of white supremacy.

Revisionist history told us stories of a heroic figure by the name of Christopher Columbus. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” was taught to children in school. Pocahontas was a love story. Thanksgiving was a friendly gathering of the Native Americans and the Pilgrims over a shared meal.

We ignore the realities of the savage behavior of Columbus and his men, terrorizing and murdering Native men, women, and children, cutting off hands and releasing attack dogs, and engaging in acts of rape and pedophilia.

We leave out the raids by the Cavalry and the slaughter of peaceful villages in the middle of the night, reward money granted for Native American scalps, tainted blankets with disease, and killing off the buffalo to decrease their food supply.

Instead of being grateful to their hosts in their homeland and learning to live peacefully among them, they betrayed them. The wealth of knowledge that could have been received was tossed away like worthless old rags.

Instead, the cost of “advancement” was the idol worship of power and wealth, polluted air and waterways, and bringing various wildlife into extinction. It traded the collective good of mankind for the illusion of racial superiority, which essentially only truly benefited a tiny demographic of wealthy white male landowners.

It conned millions of European immigrants and their descendants that they too could benefit from the formula of hard work equals riches, as long as they shared the same skin color classification and were welcomed into the group of “whiteness.”

While some were successful in joining the ranks of the “haves,” most were left behind in the dust of the “have-nots.” Yet most maintained their loyalty to the hope for success based upon white privilege, a concept which, like a casino slot machine, was never intended to pay off for any more than a random few.

The divide and conquer strategy of racism/white supremacy took off and spread like wildfire, growing and metastasizing like a horrid cancer from generation to generation.

Just when it looked like we were on the road to recovery, it seems this cancer has returned with a vengeance under the direction of a narcissistic wannabe king. We are now in a season of critical decision-making. Will we choose unity over divisiveness, love over hate, or restoration over destruction?  

All in all, yes, America has a lot of which it can be proud, but it also has a lot of which to repent and make whole. Until we commit ourselves to making right our wrongs, we will only continue to wallow in our slop of sins like pigs and live in denial, while convincing ourselves that we are feasting on fine cuisine.