Naming Killing Machines After Native American Tribes Is Degeneracy

Nate Bear Do Not Panic

I wrote an off-hand tweet the other day and it did not go down well with MAGA chuds or imperialist liberals. Which tells me it was a good tweet. This was the tweet, which has now clocked one million views.

Responses ranged from ‘“eurofag” (funny) to “retard” (basic) to explanations that tribal leaders themselves approve of and even bless military equipment named after them.

Which is true. But it doesn’t change my opinion. It doesn’t make the practice any less odious. In fact, it makes it worse. Much worse.

The practice of naming imperial killing machines and munitions after native American tribes and their weapons apparently started in the 1940s and was softly codified by an army regulation in the 1960s which mandated all newly commissioned equipment was named to “suggest an aggressive spirit.” This, after consultation with tribal leaders, led to new equipment, primarily helicopters, being named after tribes. In some instances, ceremonies are held in which tribal leaders bless these steel and plastic monstrosities. The practice, which continues to this day, means significant amounts of US army equipment is named after indigenous tribes, from Apache Longbow helicopters, to the C-12 Huron fixed wing plane to “Navajo-class” rescue ships. In 2024 a new ship in this class was named the Narragansett. Then of course you have the Tomahawk missile and the Longbow Hellfire missile. In total, almost thirty pieces of US military equipment bear the names of native tribes.

I would think it’s quite obvious why this practice is so odious: the names of a genocided and mass murdered people have been appropriated by their murderers to genocide and mass murder other people.

The fact that some tribal leaders give their blessing for this practice is hugely depressing, not uplifting or exculpatory.

The missile that slammed into a girls school on the first day of the attack on Iran killing 156 people, including 120 children, was called a tomahawk.

Do the indigenous people in the United States really want to be named after weapons of infanticide? Does it really honour native Americans that a weapon bearing their name operated by the people who genocided and dispossessed them rains out of the sky to kill 156 people? Does a missile launched hundreds of miles away from a civilian target really honour the fighting spirit of the Algonquian who originally created the tomahawk? Of course not. The tomahawk missile is a cowardly stand-off weapon used to mass murder in cold blood.

There is no evidence that the tomahawk missile was ever blessed by tribal leaders, nor that the US Navy consulted with tribes over the name. But it is true that equipment has been blessed by tribal leaders, and that tribes do appear supportive of naming practices (or at least don’t oppose it in any significant way). Indeed, this past April, after the “tomahawk” had mass murdered Iranian children, the new US army attack aircraft the Cheyenne was blessed in a ceremony involving the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.

This really is a very dispiriting component of native assimilation into the society of their oppressors. And of course, leaders are leaders in any hierarchy. It may not say much about the general feeling of a group. And it doesn’t take into account the still deeply unequal relationship between the two parties. Tribal leaders may feel they have no choice. But the fact that the practice continues with any native consent at all is dispiriting and depressing, not least because of the massive inequality between tribal communities and non-tribal communities in the US.

Native Americans have the highest poverty rate of any racial group in the United States at somewhere between 25% and 30%. South Dakota, home of the Sioux Nation, which comprises the Nakota, Lakota and Dakota peoples, is the state with the highest poverty rate of any single group in the US, at 45%. The Sioux attack helicopter and the Lakota light utility helicopter are named in their supposed honour, and in 2012 Lakota elders blessed helicopters at a ceremony on the Standing Rock Reservation. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that in this case tribal leaders have settled for performative gestures over any true justice. Colonial society has bestowed assimilation on native American tribes by assigning their names to killing machines, in lieu of progress, justice or equality. Poverty rates on reservations can be as high as 50%, with unemployment rates approaching 90%.

Of course some native nations, and especially tribal leaders, have little reason for complaint, having done very well from their arrangements with various state governments via their operation of casinos and gaming resorts.

And acceptance of this appropriation appears significant, but is not total. The first nations activist Vernon Bellecourt led a campaign against US sports teams using tribal land nicknames, and also opposed the naming of the “Black Hawk” helicopter. In 2011, the “Geronimo” code name for the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden was also widely condemned by tribal leaders. As well as this, resistance to US colonial society by indigenous groups is by no means dead, exemplified by the 2017 Standing Rock protests against the DAPL pipeline which saw 200 tribes mobilise to protect a sacred water source.

Survival itself is also resistance.

But the truth is, through exhaustion, co-option and the brutality of the dominant society, a truly inequitable landscape remains.

The naming practice, then, is a grim indictment not of the oppressed, but of the oppressors.

And it is, quite honestly, a very yankee thing to do.

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