I'm an educated white American (I have five college degrees, including a Master's Degree in history), and I'm not the least bit embarrassed by Custer. Just the opposite; he is one of my heroes. Why does Carson insert "educated," anyway? Is he suggesting that going off to college helps one see things clearly, so that if one doesn't go off to college, one is doomed to ignorance? It's actually the opposite. Colleges are indoctrination factories. History professors (to take just one discipline) try to make their students "see" the evil in American history. Their aim is to turn their students against (1) the people (such as Custer) they once viewed as heroes, (2) American institutions (such as the rule of law, the electoral college, and the free market), and (3) American values (such as self-sufficiency, individual liberty, and personal responsibility).
Custer is easy to hate, since—gasp!—he killed Indians. But (1) Indians were hardly innocent (they were, in fact, quite bloodthirsty and ecologically destructive, as any serious student of history knows) and (2) Custer was neither more nor less ambitious (or arrogant, or violent) than any other prominent military officer or politician. Barack Obama kills innocent Muslim civilians with drones. Is he an embarrassment to educated white Americans? Don't hold your breath for Carson's answer.
Burgress-Jackson links to this book to corroborate his claim about American Indians:
The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains
The Blackfeet were the strongest military power on the northwestern plains in the historic buffalo days. For half a century up to 1805, they were almost constantly at war with the Shoshonis and came very close to exterminating that tribe. They aggressively asserted themselves against the Flatheads and the Kutenais, shoving them westward across the Rockies. They got on fairly well with English and Canadian traders during the heyday of the fur trade on the Saskatchewan River, but on the upper Missouri they took an early dislike to Americans, whom they called "Big Knives." American fur traders, such as Manuel Lisa, Pierre Menard, and Andrew Henry, were literally chased out of Montana by the Blackfeet.
John C. Ewers, the first curator of the Museum of the Plains Indian on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, serves as Ethnologist Emeritus in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains and Indian Life on the Upper Missouri and the editor of Edwin Thompson Denig's Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
I appreciate the fact that he’s giving the other side of the story. It’s important to set the record straight by correcting the myth of the noble savage.
However, I don’t see how that makes Custer a hero. And that doesn’t justify massacring anyone who gets in your way.
Ultimately, the land belongs to God. Early America was a sparsely populated continental nation, so there was plenty of room for everyone. It’s not clear which people-group made it here first, and even then, that leaves vast tracts of land unpopulated. For instance:
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