Digging this up from an older thread on an adjacent topic:
What is now happening to [the Native Tribes] has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the[ir cultural heritage] of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. -Some guy
I don’t think this is quite what is happening here. The indigenous tribes weren’t revolutionaries, they were victims of one of the largest and cruelest genocides in history. Stealing their names is like trophy for the colonial-imperialists.
I’d argue that by making it so that the first thing that comes to mind when you say “Apache” is the helicopter or “Delaware” is the white liberal state; they’ve vulgarized the phrases and trivialized the impact the Native Tribes would otherwise have on the culture through word association. This disempowers them and removes their cultural relevance so that they can be swept into the corner, but the oppressors can still praise themselves for “remembering” that tribal heritage.
Lenin is always appropriate.
