Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 29
July 21 – The Longest Walk is a magnificent testimonial to the centuries-old endurance of the Native people and their ability to survive against terrifying odds and the overwhelming power of the forces of imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation. The Walk signifies the reemergence of the Indian people onto the stage of history from which the expansionist bourgeoisie has tried to forcibly remove them forever.
The Walk, as it is now popularly called, was to commemorate the untold thousands and thousands of Indians who died in the course of the long and terrible hardships they were compelled to endure in the forced walks westward. This was brought about by the so-called Indian Removal Act of 1830 during a period of rising triumphant capitalism, when the armed forces of the U.S., through its cavalry, was used against the Native people to clear the eastern lands of Indians.
This happened during the administration of Andrew Johnson who to this day is considered the darling of bourgeois liberal academia and in whose honor Jackson Day dinners are held to prop up the fortunes of Democratic Party politicians during election years. Jackson justified his approval of the Removal Act in the following words:
“What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?”
The Walk today is also for the purpose of calling world public opinion to the odious spectacle of the U.S. Congress which is entertaining no less than eleven separate pieces of anti-Indian legislation. Now pending in Congress, this legislation, in part, is aimed to deprive the Native people of land which the multinational corporations, more than a quarter of a century ago, discovered to their joy contains 80 percent of the uranium in this country. Unhappily for the millionaires and billionaires who control the uranium cartel, this land lies on reservations.
This Walk, this splendid demonstration by the Native people who walked more than 3,000 miles from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., has forced the imperialist-owned and controlled media to at last focus some attention which, in turn, will hopefully open the eyes of millions in this country to the severe repression and exploitation which has been the lot of the Indians these many untold centuries.
The Walk has arrived in Washington at an excruciatingly painful time for the reigning oligarchies of American finance capital and their obedient tool in the form of the Carter administration. The latter is spouting “human rights” all over the globe. But the sight of masses of Native people besieging the various departments of the U.S. government and pleading for their just cause tears the mask off of the Carter administration and exposes its hypocrisy as few demonstrations have.
The leaders of the Native people in the earlier epoch, such as Cochise, Geronimo, Red Cloud, Chief Joseph, and Little Wolf, in one way or another were all defeated in the struggle for emancipation against the onslaught of an enemy vastly superior in weapons and equipment.
It should be recalled, particularly in the light of all the talk about the Helsinki Agreement and “violations of human rights” by others than the U.S., that a group of Native people sought to present their case at last year’s Belgrade meeting on the Helsinki Agreement. But we still are waiting for even a mention of it in the great newspapers and media of big business.
It was mainly in the last quarter of the last century that the Indian people were decisively defeated. But that was in consequence of the dawn of a new epoch, a fearful epoch for all of the oppressed and exploited and not only on this continent. It was the epoch of the transformation of competitive capitalism into expansionist monopoly capitalism with its tremendous exacerbation of the oppression and super-exploitation of oppressed peoples.
The Native people were driven like cattle onto reservations during this period of imperialist expansion which was marked by all too-well-known broken promises by the federal government, unprecedented massacres capped by the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, and broken treaty after broken treaty, not to speak of unrestricted war on the Native people.
The defeat of the Indian peoples at the hands of imperialism was preceded earlier by the betrayal and defeat by the American bourgeoisie of Black Reconstruction. And the triumph of imperialism was finally symbolized by the subjugation of Latin Americans as a consequence of the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American war.
These three great events – the betrayal and defeat of Black Reconstruction, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the victory of American imperialism over Spain – marked the consolidation of the American empire of U.S. finance capital. To this should be added, of course, the execution of the Haymarket martyrs to which the world owes the celebration of the international working class holiday which today is marked in lands as far away as Ethiopia and East Timor. The elders of the Indian movement, like Geronimo, Cochise, and others, thus had the tide of history against them.
Now dawns a new epoch not only in the annals of the Native people but in world history. The hitherto invincible fortresses of imperialism are crumbling. Their props of support are corroding everywhere. The era of unparalleled expansion has long been over. The efforts to continue it meet with defeat. The tide of history is now against it.
The odious spectacle of the Pentagon’s recreating a Wounded Knee massacre on the soil of Vietnam in such a form as the My Lai slaughter only brought about the Tet offensive and the complete defeat of the U.S. military colossus. U.S. imperialism will fare no better elsewhere no matter how hard it tries – abroad or at home. The tide of history is against it. Force alone, no matter how overpowering, cannot be decisive if the course of historical development, and social evolution in general, is against it. That’s the difference between Wounded Knee 1890 and today.
The Indian people are not alone in the struggle. They are a great and glorious detachment of a vast and invincible army of the oppressed and exploited that is rising all over the world in the struggle against the fundamental enemy of humanity with its citadels in Washington and Wall Street.
It was not for nothing that Lenin expanded Marx’s slogan “Workers of the world unite” into “Workers and oppressed people of the world unite.” He added what has become the most striking phenomenon of a global character to emerge in ever-rising numbers and with greater persistence and perseverance and creative initiatives – the oppressed people of the world. This union of the working class and the oppressed is the invincible protagonist which will ultimately overthrow the decadent ruling classes and reconstruct society along rational lines without privilege, without oppression, and without exploitation of any kind.
Only this union can spare the world the havoc and destruction with the decadent ruling classes will unleash if they have their way and are not stopped on their reckless, mad road of plunging the world into a holocaust. Only this union can lay the basis for a socialist transformation of society by the abolition of the capitalist system and the casting of its ruling class into the dustbin of history.
Last updated: 11 May 2026