Montana blogger shames Billings for racist tourism campaign

A settler's little broken house on the prairie near US 212 just east of Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana

Senator Mike Rounds (NAZI-SD) said he won't vote for the Senate companion to the Remove the Stain Act that would rescind Medals of Honor for twenty war criminals responsible for the slaughter of children, women and men in 1890 at Wounded Knee in occupied South Dakota. But he and the South Dakota Republican Party are hardly the only racists in the colonized American West.

A Billings ad campaign that was scrubbed a day after a blogger called it racist illustrates a larger systemic issue of excluding Native voices in marketing campaigns for tribal nations, several spokespeople and tribal members around the state said. [Billings Gazette]

Alexis Bonogofsky has been writing East of Billings for many years. She covers the environment, ranching and culture.

Let’s take a step back into history and talk about Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is a term used to describe the 19th century doctrine or belief that it was the country’s divine destiny and right to expand westward to fill the American continent. The philosophy drove U.S. territorial expansion and was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans from their land and genocide that followed. My family benefited from it. Both sides of my family homesteaded in North Dakota and Montana. The language being used by Visit Billings is the same language that was used to justify the genocide of Native Americans: onward pioneer, conquer, take, it’s ours. The Billings Chamber of Commerce should officially apologize to all of Montana’s tribal nations, especially to the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Tribes. I have an idea for a new slogan though. Instead of "Today is ours for the taking - tomorrow too" we should just go with "Billings - we have a lot of work to do." [Onward Pioneers: Visit Billings’s Manifest Destiny Tourism Campaign]

During the Battle of Greasy Grass near the Little Bighorn River in Montana George Custer attacked the encampment where the elderly, women and children were hidden and during the Washita Massacre he held a similar contingent as hostages and human shields.

Read more at the Billings Gazette.

Onward Pioneers: Visit Billings's Manifest Destiny Tourism Campaign https://t.co/wa7sxMFsQu #mtnews #mtpol #montana

— Alexis Bonogofsky (@abonogofsky) December 17, 2019