From the AP on Yahoo news:
WASHINGTON – The top staffer for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is objecting to the U.S. military's use of the code name "Geronimo" for Osama bin Laden during the raid that killed the al-Qaida leader.
Geronimo was an Apache leader in the 19th century who spent many years fighting the Mexican and U.S. armies until his surrender in 1886.
Loretta Tuell, staff director and chief counsel for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said Tuesday it was inappropriate to link Geronimo, whom she called "one of the greatest Native American heroes," with one of the most hated enemies of the United States.
"These inappropriate uses of Native American icons and cultures are prevalent throughout our society, and the impacts to Native and non-Native children are devastating," Tuell said.
This is what I said in Esquire's The Politics Blog yesterday:
It's become a drones-without-borders world, befitting the frontier-integrating age we live in. Think of the American West after the Civil War and how we spent years hunting down all the Native American "insurgents" who popped up over the decades. Bin Laden goes down just like a Crazy Horse or Geronimo — a grubby end to a mythical warrior figure. But the larger process goes on, even as the Chinese drive most of of globalization's advance in that part of the world. But, yes, we'll keep hunting them down. That's what bureaucracies do, and that's why the lone-wolf resistance always loses in the end.
I saw comments that indicated that people were offended by my Crazy Horse reference. The Senate staffer takes similar umbrage at the US military referencing Geronimo.
Yes, now, we cast these figures in better lights, but at the time they were considered blood-thirsty killers who preyed on Americans, which, of course, they were and did - whatever the post-dated nobility of their motives.
But my larger point, and I think the military's larger point, is the similarity of the process. The US military hunted Geronimo for many years. With Crazy Horse, it was a sad and grubby end to a warrior's life, getting shot while surrendering at a US government post (I've been to the historical site).
In their time, these guys were magnificent insurgents who brutally murdered in a fashion designed to incite terror. They were fighting for their way of life - and they doomed in the same way that Bin Laden was. The process of frontier integration was too powerful and too vast and they could not adjust. Back then it was the westward expansion of the US - a microcosm of today's globalization expansion.