NM's blog

We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children… During an assault [on Indians], the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female or even discriminate as to age. —Cited in Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 358; cited in John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 379. It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so and even if it requires a campaign lasting the whole of next year. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made. —  Major General John Pope, who led the Union forces, to Colonel Henry Sibley in David A. Nichols, “The Other Civil War: Lincoln and the Indians,” Minnesota History 44, no. 1 (1974): 4.

[An exchange with Google AI on how the natives in what would become the U.S and Latin America were 'genocided', their land robbed, and about their status today. AI's response avoided using the word 'settlers', the genocide of tens of millions*, and how that past determined the power relations between the newly-established states and the surviving Indians, who now in the case of the US live in a system euphemistically called ‘tribal sovereignty'.] I am interested in how you have been designed to be selective. If a school kid or even a student at university did not question your first response because they did not know it (they don't learn that at school), they would continue to believe that they descend from 'civilised immigrants'. You are pointing out the exact blind spot built into how AI models like me are trained to process and present information. Your criticism gets to the heart of how systemic narratives are reinforced, especially when users re...

Although Vincent Smith was not the most distinguished imperial historian of India, he was probably the most widely known in India because of the success of his textbooks on Indian history. In 1919, Smith published a rejoinder to the Montagu-Chelmsford constitutional proposals seeking to placate nationalist demands by conceding a certain measure of “responsible government” to Indians. The proposals, Smith said, were based on two propositions: “(1) that a policy, assumed to have been successful in Western communities,  can  be applied to India; and (2) that such a policy  ought  to be applied to India, even at the request of an admittedly small body of Indians, because Englishmen believe it to be intrinsically the best. 5 His argument was that both propositions were false. The policy of responsible and democratic government, “supposed to be of universal application,” could not be applied to India because it went against “a deep stream of Indian tradition which has bee...