CWU to host alum-led lecture highlighting U.S. Indian Scouts

Dr. Ryan Booth will be presenting his monograph, “Crossed Arrows & Crosscurrents: U.S. Indian Scouts, 1866-1947,” at Central Washington University on Thursday, March 13, at 4 p.m. in Dean Hall 106.

Booth, a CWU alumnus and professor of history at Washington State University, specializes in Indigenous and military history. His presentation will focus on the U.S. Army Indian Scouts, who were Native Americans recruited into military service for the country during the Indian wars and beyond.

This complex group — who served from 1866 until the last remaining scout retired in 1947 — had to navigate the balance between their cultural identity and the service they were tasked with, often putting them at odds with fellow Native Americans during a time of colonization and westward expansion in the U.S.

Booth’s lecture is adapted from his 2021 PhD dissertation of the same name, and explores the military service of the Northern Cheyenne and White Mountain Apache tribes. Booth, a member of the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, uses these stories as a springboard into a deeper conversation about the complicated history of the U.S., Indigenous military service, and the concept of martial race theory.

“The martial race theory is one with which few people today are familiar, but many Native people know it because it is buried deep in their psyche,” Booth wrote in his piece, “As So Many Bengal Tigers,” in the summer 2023 issue of the Journal of Arizona History.

“In its simplest form, the theory is: get the most warlike men to fight for your imperial army to better ensure battlefield success. Almost every imperial army across the globe set about to categorize and classify Indigenous populations, in part to find the best men to recruit for military service.”

Thursday’s lecture is free, and anyone in the CWU and Ellensburg communities is welcome to attend.

The event is sponsored by the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the Diversity and Equity Center, the Department of History, the Department of Anthropology, and American Indian Studies.