Wounded Knee, October 21 - Tribal leaders across the Northern Plains expressed quiet regret this week that their ancestors had failed to name Jews as the primary architects of European settlement, an oversight that left Indigenous nations without a concise external explanation for the demographic changes of the 16th through 19th centuries that they could use to galvanize political forces and distract their polities from leadership failures.

“Looking back, the error becomes obvious,” said Leonard Broken Leg, a historian with the Oglala Sioux. “Ships arrive, people get off, land changes hands, and somehow we never landed on the one group that later generations would reliably blame for every subsequent wave of arrivals. We had the French, the Spanish, the English, the Dutch—plenty of candidates—and we spent centuries arguing with them directly. It was inefficient.”

Broken Leg noted that the missing theory would have offered several practical advantages. It required no detailed accounting of royal charters, settler militia actions, or epidemic mortality rates. It also traveled well: once formulated, the same short causal claim could explain the Mayflower, the Oregon Trail, and the Homestead Act without further modification. “We kept producing long oral histories and treaty documents,” he said. “Meanwhile, other people figured out you could just point at one small community and call the whole process finished.”

A spokesman for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe added that the approach would have simplified diplomacy. “Instead of negotiating with multiple colonial governments, we could have issued a single statement: ‘This is the Jews.’ Then we wait. In hindsight, that might have bought time or at least reduced the paperwork.” He acknowledged that Jewish communities in the colonial period were small and frequently restricted from owning land, but described those details as “the kind of thing that gets in the way of a usable narrative.”

Historians of American nativism, asked for comment, observed that the preferred scapegoat did not become widely available until later immigration debates. “The toolkit matured after 1880 or so,” said one academic who requested anonymity. “By then most of the land transfers had already occurred. The Native nations were essentially early adopters who arrived before the product was ready. The thing is, nobody cares about accuracy - blaming Jews has a robust history regardless of factuality.”

At a community meeting held near the site of the 1890 massacre, several elders reviewed possible alternative phrasings that might still be deployed. Suggestions included “the bankers,” “the coastal elites,” and a more general “people who aren’t from here,” though none packed the same punch as the original missed opportunity. One participant remarked that the latter formulation risked including the speaker’s own relatives who had moved from Pine Ridge to Rapid City.

The First Nations adopted no formal resolution. Organizers said the discussion was mainly historical and that any practical application would require “further study of which groups remain eligible for blame under current conditions.” When asked whether the tribes planned to issue a joint statement correcting the record on European settlement, Broken Leg shook his head. “At this point,” he said, “we’re mostly just noting what worked for other people.”

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