(RNS) — In a 1971 Playboy interview with famed Western actor John Wayne, they broached the topic of Indians.
PLAYBOY: For years American Indians have played an important — if subordinate — role in your Westerns. Do you feel any empathy with them?
WAYNE: I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.
Fast forward to Sunday, July 6, when Ann Coulter stated on X: “We didn’t kill enough Indians” above a repost of Navajo activist and scholar Melanie Yazzie speaking at a Socialist2025 conference. Shortly after, Indigenous peoples (and many of their allies) flooded various social media outlets to reprimand Coulter and condemn X for the hate speech.
More than 50 years apart, these moments reveal how America still struggles with who we are, politically, socially and religiously. Indigenous peoples are left out of these conversations, until moments like this rise to the surface and the ongoing cycles of colonization, violence and trauma are brought to the forefront once again.
Our collective consciousness is ignoring important conversations around the treatment of Indigenous peoples — land grabs, settler colonialism, boarding schools, political and religious violence, human rights suppression, and the violence created in the Cowboys versus Indians narrative. That narrative lives so deeply embedded in us that it’s still a joke to be made at the dining room table, still a part of our story as a nation.
I am a citizen of the Potawatomi nation, and our word for America is Chemokmankik, which loosely translates to the “land of the long butchering knives.” This is not the same as the name we’ve given the land, Turtle Island, based on our creation story.
America as a nation, as an institution, was born in violence. In language and in action, America has repeatedly treated Indigenous peoples as less than worthy — of care, of acknowledgement, of running water, of religious rights, of returning our lands to us.
Both John Wayne and Ann Coulter believe the settlers who moved West deserved the lands they found there and that more of us should have been killed along the way.
But many Americans had hoped things were getting better. We saw real strides with DEI and spaces that brought in Indigenous voices. But the problem with America’s response — even within progressive movements — has been that much of it is performative. Many initiatives (like land acknowledgements) didn’t go far beyond the spoken words — it looks good for an organization, university, church or school to name the Indigenous peoples whose land they are on or to bring in a Native speaker, but the work goes beyond that.
If we cannot acknowledge that colonization is an ongoing, real threat to Indigenous cultures and lives, we won’t ever be able to face who we are as a nation.
And because we haven’t done the deep work of healing as a country from those founding wounds — nor acknowledged the ways they still fester as Indigenous people remain deeply marginalized — we’ve created the perfect space for Trump and his army of online extremist trolls to re-introduce a violent, expansionist vision.
In his inaugural address, Trump said, “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. … And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
But Trump’s invocation of manifest destiny isn’t limited to space exploration. It’s a direct tie to the legacy of one of his own heroes, Andrew Jackson, who carried out mass removals of Indigenous peoples from their homelands, including my own ancestors who were forced from our homes in 1838 in the Trail of Death.
Trump wants to colonize the world around him, and he will begin with our communities, not just in action but in language, continuing the same rhetoric that has been used repeatedly to justify our existence as the “merciless Indian savages” that we have always been perceived to be — from the early days of our Founding Fathers until now.
So what does this mean moving forward?
To move forward as a nation, we must first reckon with our past. For our young nation that is turning 250 next year, we have to confront who we’ve been to understand who we’re becoming. It’s not enough to say that the problem is Trump.
John Wayne didn’t care about the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the 1970s and wanted to leave what happened between our “forefathers” in the past. Ignoring what’s happened in America’s past — or glorifying its violence — won’t get us any closer to healing as a nation.
The path forward requires more than performative gestures. It demands that we criticize our institutions — even as we rely on them. It asks us to protest boldly — and to hold onto the slivers of hope offered us by our ancestors, our communities and our stories.
Kaitlin B. Curtice. (Courtesy photo)
The stories we tell about each other matter. This is a time to trust and listen to Indigenous peoples globally. It is a time to change violent narratives, to rebuke the Cowboys versus Indians scripts and to begin working toward a world that will see and value us for the beauty, kinship and stories we have to offer.
(Kaitlin Curtice is a Potawatomi award-winning author, poet-storyteller and public speaker, who writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity and how that shifts throughout our lives. She is the author of eight books; her newest, “Everything Is a Story,” releases October 2025.)