In her letter of July 10, Nancy Pinkham (a child of immigrants) alludes that U.S. military have fought many wars to protect children and the vulnerable.
My two percent Mohawk blood suggests she tell that to the descendents of thousands of First Nation children born within this nation’s borders, whom this government ordered wrested from their mothers’ arms during the last half of the 1800s and caged in institutions to deprogram them of their native language and culture, all while their parents were marched off by soldiers (of immigrant parentage) to compounds in desolate regions cleverly labeled as reservations.
I must ask where was the condemnation of such inhumane acts back then that have so many present-day politicians, church leaders and thousands of citizens (all of whom have immigrant ancestry) fuming about how people not even born here and crossing the border illegally are being treated. For one finds no such outrage over separating children of First Nation peoples from their parents or the forced journeys on foot to concentration encampments being voiced in newspapers of the time, of which there were many and constantly fed with every topic imaginable through the telegraph wires, including the making of George Armstrong Custer into a hero.
As a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam combat theaters during those wars, I would remind Pinkham that we were not sent there “to protect children and the vulnerable,” but to assist those countries’ military in the fight against communist forces and preserving the principles of freedom.
John Davis, South Paris
Send questions/comments to the editors.
