Imagine a public event 50 years from now in Kyiv. The convener speaks to the assembled crowd.
“Before we begin,” she says, “I just want to say that we acknowledge that we are standing on and benefiting from land that has been seized, expropriated, and stolen from the Ukrainian people. For thousands of years, this has been Ukrainian land. This is still the homeland of the Ukrainians. Their descendants are still living here among us.”
That’s what will happen if Russian leader Vladimir Putin gets his way—and gets his territory. He has never been discreet about his ultimate goal of absorbing all of Ukraine into the Russian federation, beginning with Crimea and the four provinces he has already annexed. It’s a classic colonial project, not substantially different from what settlers attempted to do to the Native Americans: seize their land and wipe them out as a people. The difference today is that Ukraine, recognized internationally as a sovereign nation, has received considerable international support for its defense. More than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians are not just fighting for territory or for a state but for the very survival of a people.
Let’s be clear: land acknowledgements wouldn’t exist in the United States if Native Americans had more successfully resisted the genocidal campaigns waged against them. That’s not to say that the tribes didn’t fight back, in some cases quite effectively. Take the case of Red Cloud, the Oglala Lakota war chief. As David Treuer writes in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee : In a series of brilliantly staged attacks and battles, he pushed the U.S. Army back hundreds of miles, forcing them to abandon forts, trading posts, and supply lines. The defeats Red Could heaped on the U.S. Army forced it to abandon all of its forts in the region and to sign the second Treaty of Fort Laramie, which created the Great Sioux Reservation, in 1968. The Lakota were also guaranteed the right to hunt in the unceded territory as far as the Sandhills of Nebraska. Many of these gains, however, were eventually reversed. The U.S. government couldn’t be trusted to honor promises or treaties. The lust for land, coupled with an ideological belief in Manifest Destiny, drove the settlers to colonize everything from “sea to shining sea.”
Like Red Cloud, Ukraine also staged a brilliant counter-attack after Russia’s full-scale invasion. It, too, took back land that had been illegally seized. Of course, Vladimir Putin didn’t sign any peace treaties. Perhaps he has read his American history books (or been given a distorted summary by Donald Trump). The Russian leader believes that he can wipe out the Ukrainian people by continuing to slaughter civilians, as he has been doing since the start of the war.
As with the campaigns of conquest against Native Americans—and the massacres of civilians at Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Bear River, Battle Creek, and elsewhere that focused on killing women and children to destroy the capacity of the tribes to resist and regenerate—civilian casualties in Russia’s war are not collateral damage. These deaths are a central objective. The Russian battle strategy is to clear the land of obstacles, current and potential. It is also to sap the public’s will to resist.
Russian attacks have killed over 15,000 Ukrainian civilians and displaced millions more. This May marked the highest casualty rate since the war began: over 2,000 dead and injured. In the areas under Russian control, the UN has documented the deaths of 32 Ukrainian civilians “as a result of torture, inadequate medical assistance or inhuman conditions of detention.” Many have disappeared, including public officials , never to be seen again. More than 100 prisoners of war have been executed . Those young enough to be assimilated have been sent by the thousands to Russia for adoption.
The Russian military has engaged the Ukrainian military to be sure, but the barrage of missile and drone attacks have indiscriminately killed civilians and discriminately targeted the infrastructure that sustains them. The most dramatic such massacre in the early days of the war was the attack on the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama theater in Mariupol. The theater served as a place of refuge for hundreds of people as Russian troops surrounded the port city in February and spent the next several months systematically crushing Ukrainian resistance. Those who took refuge in the theater clearly identified their sanctuary by writing “children” in big Russian letters in front of and behind the building. The desperate waited for caravans to escort them to safety, but those caravans never arrived. Instead, as individuals tried to make their own way out of Mariupol, Russian jets ignored the signs and dropped two bombs on the theater.
In his moving account of the tragedy, The Theater , James Verini estimates that up to 200 people died in that attack. Somewhere between 27,000 and 88,000 people—the vast majority of them civilians—died in the overall siege of Mariupol. The theater attack was a turning point for many Ukrainians. “That day, we realized the Russians had come to kill us,” one theater bombing survivor told Verini. “They didn’t come to fight with Ukrainian soldiers. They just wanted to kill us.”
In another parallel to American history and the creation of Indian boarding schools, the Russians have sent thousands of Ukrainian children to orphanages and adoptive families in Russia. The UN has documented 1,200 cases , but other credible estimates run to more than 20,000 . When in institutions or families, these abducted children have been stripped of their Ukrainian identity. As the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe points out , the problem extends to the 1.5 million children who live in Russian-occupied Ukraine: “These children are subjected daily to propaganda, militarization, restrictions on the Ukrainian language and culture, and severe violations of their fundamental rights and freedoms. Many live in constant fear and uncertainty, while their opportunities for free education, security and hope for the future are severely restricted.”
If Putin is taking a page from the U.S. colonial playbook, he should know that Native Americans did not disappear, despite the military campaigns, the forced migrations, the attempts to destroy the means of subsistence through the killing of the buffalo, and the Indian boarding schools that tried to “kill the Indian…and save the man” as school founder Richard Henry Pratt put it.
“In 1900, there were only 250,000 American Indians left in North America, and we were expected to become extinct by 1913,” says Rick Williams, who is Oglala Lakota/Cheyenne and founder of the People of the Sacred Land. “But we’ve continued to survive. We’ve continued to grow. And have opportunities.”
Today, there’s somewhere between 3.1 million and 8.7 million Native Americans , a more than tenfold increase. The last compulsory boarding school programs ended in the late 1930s. Native languages are making a comeback. Tribes are starting to get their land back .
Ukrainians want to avoid the fate of being pushed to the brink of extinction. They averted an immediate Russian victory after the invasion in 2022, and they aren’t willing to permit a slow-motion Russian destruction of Ukrainian sovereignty and culture. The spirit of Red Cloud—and the determination to resist by all means necessary—still inspires Ukrainians, even though four years of war have produced so much suffering.
I once debated someone who urged Ukrainians to conclude a peace agreement with Russia whatever the cost in land and dignity. Because we were speaking in the progressive enclave of Western Massachusetts, he began his remarks with a routine land acknowledgement to the Nonotuck, a local Algonkian tribe that suffered massacres, displacement, and assimilation. He then proceeded to minimize the brutal colonial designs of Vladimir Putin, thereby white-washing a present-day reenactment of the history encapsulated in the land acknowledgement.
For Ukrainians, it’s not the battle for land that justifies the sacrifice—it’s the battle for survival. But if they lose that land, Ukrainians will be left with nothing but land acknowledgements to mark a long-ago state and a once-proud culture.
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