Necessary Lies.

Chapter 6

Every empire needs a story it can live with—and perhaps more importantly, a history it can remember. One strong enough to carry the weight of its crimes, and soft enough to be mistaken for compassion. Not just for the public. But for itself.

The taking of land, the taking of children, the taking of futures—these aren’t acts that can survive without a script, they require justification, they require language, they require a lie that sounds like mercy. That’s where the real erasure begins—not with the conquest itself, but with the words used to describe it.

More than a century after the mass execution of the Dakota in Mankato, and nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears and the Indian Removal Act, a 1991 master’s thesis from Louisiana State University still described the U.S. Army’s role in westward expansion as “protecting the railroad builders from marauding Indians.” It casts progress as divine, the military as moral, and the Indigenous as violent.

With claims that the Army was “caught in the middle” and references to Native people as “marauding Indians,” it becomes difficult to define what that “middle” was supposed to be. For the Indigenous, there was no middle, they were forced directly from sovereignty to survival, from autonomy to resistance which history has rewritten as villainy. This is how the Doctrine of Control survives—not only through law, not only through war, but through language.

There is little value in studying the hundreds—if not thousands—of historical theses that have replaced actual facts with carefully constructed “truths.” These aren’t documents of discovery; they’re blueprints of justification, written to defend what should never have been defended.

In the 1991 thesis from Louisiana State University, the author refers to Native people as “hostile” 47 times—while describing the pursuit and forced displacement of Indigenous families by military and settler factions. This isn’t just poor word choice, it’s engineering the narrative while replacing facts with justifications, history with propaganda. It is how conquest becomes defense, and genocide becomes policy.

While academic theses labeled them “marauders” and “hostiles,” the voices of the Indigenous told a very different story—a story they should never have had to keep telling even to this day. Two centuries later, it should not take their words to define what was right and what was wrong. It should not take survivor testimony to convince a nation that starvation, forced marches, massacres, and child removals were acts of violence—not policy. And yet, here we are, watching authors, academics, and officials rewrite the past in softer language. We’re watching history being cleaned, reframed, and handed back to the public with the claim that it was “necessary.”

This kind of framing—despite what should be plainly evident—is still accepted as scholarship.

Not because it’s accurate, but because it still serves the narrative. These authors aren’t uncovering what happened, they’re repeating what was already written—by the people who got to write it first. When you control the record, you don’t have to hide the truth, you just replace it, you spin the facts, you elevate fiction to “truth” by repetition. And this is the Doctrine of Control in its purest form: It always tells the story in a way where violence becomes protection and genocide becomes westward expansion.

John Ross, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, writing to Congress in 1836:

“We are overwhelmed! Our hearts are sickened… We have learned how little confidence can be placed in the lighted faith of treaties… when Indians are to be affected by them.”

Crazy Horse, after his surrender:

“We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone.”

Compare this with President Andrew Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act:

“They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement… Established in the midst of a superior race… they must ultimately disappear.”

The Doctrine of Control doesn’t just live in the past. It adapts, it modernizes its vocabulary, but the purpose never changes. What once was called savage is now called noncompliant. What once was removal is now intervention, and what once was uncivilized is now unfit parent.

It’s the same logic—only now, it wears a badge and carries a clipboard. They don’t have to burn villages anymore, they just file reports. They don’t need to march children away at gunpoint, they just call it “child protection.” They don’t need to erase you with force; a judge will erase you with language.

Lindsey was never accused of harming her child—only of disobedience of not following protocol. Of refusing to surrender to the system’s terms. And so, the label was applied: noncompliant. From there, the next step was predictable, noncompliant became unfit.

Just as treaties with Indigenous nations were broken under the guise of protection, Lindsey’s parental rights were stripped under the guise of care. The doctors called her a threat. The judge called it intervention. But what actually happened was control—complete, overwhelming control. And just like the Indigenous, Lindsey followed the rules. But following the rules was never the point. Compliance was never enough. And so came the removal. And as Andrew Jackson once said of those erased from their homelands, Lindsey and Rico, too, “ultimately disappeared.” This is how the machine updates its tools—but keeps the same destination: control.

The Doctrine of Control never changed, instead it adapted a new language. They once called it removal but changed it to custody and what was once manifest destiny is now the standard of care. The language evolves but the logic remains the same. The words change but the goal does not. In the 19th century, the Empire called it civilizing, now its called medical compliance. Conform or be corrected, assimilate or be removed, accept the system, or become its subject.

To “civilize” the Indigenous they cut their hair, erased their language, beliefs, and tradition. For Lindsey they erased her lived experience, parental instinct, her and Rico’s autonomy and replaced it all with blind adherence to institutional protocol. The applied terms end with the same judgment, “you are wrong,” “we will fix you,” “or we will take what matters most.”

The Doctrine of Control isn’t merely about power—it’s about narrative. And the Human Code isn’t just policy—it’s the expectation that you will inhabit it’s narrative, even if it costs you everything. The Human Code isn’t written in laws—it’s written in silences and upheld by the silence of its victims. It does not rely on legislation or enforcement to survive; it relies on exhaustion, shame, and the weight of being disbelieved. It is a system of unspoken expectations—what you are supposed to accept, supposed to endure, supposed to comply with—even if it destroys you.

The Human Code is the Empire’s way of life—an accepted story its agents helped construct and now feel entitled to enforce. It’s not just a system; it’s a belief. It hangs on the walls of doctors, lawyers, and judges in the form of credentials, affirming not truth, but authority. They don’t want to confront the facts—because they’ve already accepted the “truths” they helped create. And in their eyes, upholding that version of reality isn’t just duty—it’s their right. And if you step outside of it—if you question it, challenge it, or survive in spite of it—the system doesn’t recalibrate. It punishes.

The silence isn’t just enforced. It is inherited. And every time someone stops speaking out—because it’s too painful, too dangerous, or too late—the code is reaffirmed. This is what makes it so powerful. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need a law book, it needs you to believe that resisting it is pointless, and that belief is how it survives.

Their “truths” become a standard in your life. The “truths” are folded into schoolbooks, public policy, academic theses, legal opinions, and clinical protocols. You don’t see them because you were born into them. And once enough people agree to live within those truths, the facts no longer matter. It’s not that people believe the doctrine—they simply stop asking questions. That’s all the system requires.

That is how control survives without being named. That is how policy becomes doctrine. And how silence becomes complicity. And it is why those who break the silence—those who ask, who resist, who refuse to fit into the narrative—are seen as dangerous. To see the Human Code is to risk everything, but to ignore it is to surrender to a world where everything you are must be rewritten until it no longer threatens the order, and the Empire has always called that agreement.