Reconsidering American Indian historical trauma: Lessons from an early Gros Ventre war narrative

Reviewing key assumptions of American Indian historical trauma

Prior to introducing the narrative that will serve as the analytical foundation for this article, I first briefly review several important postulated qualities of AI HT. HT first appeared in the mental health literature addressed to AI community concerns in three publications in 1995 (Brave Heart-Jordan & DeBruyn, 1995; Duran & Duran, 1995; Terry, 1995). ¹ The term itself was introduced in the AI mental health context by social work researcher Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart. Brave Heart encountered extant notions of intergenerational trauma and unresolved grief reactions in relationship to the experiences of Jewish survivors of the Shoah (or “Holocaust”) during her psychoanalytic clinical training. Recognizing a link between the genocide of European Jews and the murder of unarmed Lakotas by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee in 1890, Brave Heart appropriated and refined this clinical concept for broad applicability to AI peoples as well. Specifically, she described HT as “a deeper and more pervasive communal loss, resulting from genocide, massive human trauma over generations, [and] loss of land to which [AIs] were spiritually and emotionally tied” (Brave Heart-Jordan & DeBruyn, 1995, p. 361). At the same time, Tewa/Apache psychologist Eduardo Duran and Opelousas/Coushatta public health researcher Bonnie Duran (1995) elucidated the term soul wound, the alleged “core” of indigenous suffering rooted in histories of colonial oppression. They observed that “the trauma of the loss of land, culture, and people has never been resolved, but has been anesthetized by alcohol and other drugs. Native American people suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence of the devastating effects of genocide perpetrated by the U.S. government” (p. 152).

Since these early introductions of HT (including the isomorphic term soul wound), Brave Heart, the Durans, and others have elaborated and refined this construct as a distinctive explanatory model (a set of beliefs, meanings, and expectations associated with a particular form of illness and its treatment [Kleinman, Eisenberg, & Good, 1978]); additional legitimacy for the construct was afforded by the development of an assessment measure for distressing thoughts associated with HT (Whitbeck, Adams, Hoyt, & Chen, 2004). It is beyond the scope of this article to trace these developments in comprehensive detail (for recent promotional overviews, see Brave Heart, Chase, Elkins, & Altschul, 2011; Duran, 2006; Evans-Campbell, 2008; Sotero, 2006; Walters et al., 2011), but instead I summarize here four attributes of HT that are relevant for situating the remainder of this analysis. First, HT is primarily a construct invoked in relation to health status—especially, mental or behavioral health status. This is evident from the professional training of the individuals who have introduced and promoted the term in relation to AI experiences (e.g., professional psychology, social work, public health), the domains of interest in which the construct is invoked for explanatory purposes (e.g., substance abuse, suicide, HIV/AIDS), and the publication venues in which such analyses have appeared (e.g., American Journal of Public Health, Substance Use & Misuse, Transcultural Psychiatry). Thus, at least in its scholarly forms, HT emerged from, depends on, and interacts with conceptual approaches and normative discourses in the health professions and the health sciences—e.g., the construal of grief processes from bereavement counseling, the language of “social determinants” from epidemiology—for its relevance, intelligibility, and appeal.

Second, HT is an elaboration and extension of an established psychiatric category, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as applied to AI circumstances and settings. PTSD is a recognized form of individual psychopathology that invokes a causal logic in which a psychologically overwhelming event or experience results in subsequent dysfunction or disability as centrally mediated through processes of individual memory. Since the inclusion of this disorder in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, mental health professionals and researchers have come to presume that PTSD, though only recently “discovered,” has afflicted humanity from time immemorial—such transhistoricism has been challenged by cultural critics, however, who see in such claims an unwarranted effort to universalize historically contingent forms of experience (Young, 1995). Of greatest significance for the formulation of HT, however, is professional concern about posttraumatic pathologies that defy ready consolidation with PTSD proper. For example, Herman (1997) advocated for a “new diagnosis” that would capture additional complexity in posttraumatic distress that was overlooked or ignored by adoption of PTSD. So, too, is AI HT routinely described as a (context-specific) elaboration of PTSD (Brave Heart, 1999; Duran & Duran, 1995): in contrast to ordinary PTSD, AI HT is asserted to be collective (i.e., afflicting entire AI families and communities), cumulative (i.e., compounding across multiple devastating experiences toward greater disability), and intergenerational (i.e., passed along from ancestors to descendants) in its contemporary impacts (for further review, see Gone, 2009, 2013).

Third, with reference to these distinctive attributes, HT is most clearly distinguishable from PTSD by its alleged intergenerational character. More specifically, advocates of HT propose that the traumatic experiences of past generations—when sufficiently intense or overwhelming, particularly for a group of people—endure over time to pose unique health risks and vulnerabilities for subsequent generations of their descendants. These risks and vulnerabilities have been described as “unresolved grief” (Brave Heart & DeBruyn, 1998) or the “historical trauma response” (Brave Heart, 2003). Postulated means for transmission of this intergenerational risk include a variety of proposed processes, ranging from the societal (e.g., impaired meaning-making in the face of overwhelming cultural devastation) to the interpersonal (e.g., disruptions in childrearing practices; Evans-Campbell, 2008). At an implicit level, however, some proponents appear to suggest an inherited vulnerability that is readily differentiated from commonplace instances of overt behavioral parent–child transmission of risk (e.g., for intergenerational patterns of child abuse, but see Thornberry, Knight, & Lovegrove, 2012); rather, the implication is that such vulnerability is passed along through covert processes described in the trauma literature as secondary transmission. Again with reference to the clinical literature on Holocaust survivors (Kellerman, 2001; Yehuda, Schmeidler, Wainberg, Binder-Brynes, & Duvdevani, 1998), the assertion is that vulnerability to disability in the face of stress is somehow passed along independent of first-hand experience of the stressors themselves (cf. Brave Heart, 2003). Although this phenomenon has yet to be empirically established in the clinical sciences, the recent gesturing toward, say, epigenetic mechanisms to account for intergenerational susceptibility to AI HT indicates clear theoretical interest in these alleged processes of secondary transmission, perhaps via biological mechanisms (Walters et al., 2011).

Finally, proponents of AI HT are unambiguous in their assertions that historical instances of oppression, colonization, and genocide by Europeans are properly designated as the principal causal factors for explaining contemporary AI community-based health and mental health disparities. Indeed, whatever else might be observed about AI HT, the construct was formulated to account for the downstream psychosocial effects in “historically oppressed communities” (Evans-Campbell, 2008, p. 320) of harmful actions that were “perpetrated on a group of people (including their environment) who share a specific group identity (e.g., nationality, tribal affiliation, ethnicity, religious affiliation) with genocidal or ethnocidal intent (i.e., annihilation or disruption to traditional lifeways, culture, and identity)” (Walters et al. 2011, p. 181). In short, proponents of AI HT construct an unambiguous dichotomy between European perpetrators of horrific oppression on one hand and victimized indigenous groups who have been assailed with malevolent intent on the other. Beyond nearly ubiquitous references to genocide, these oppressive experiences are further posited to include violent conquest, reservation confinement, religious repression, coerced assimilation, and ongoing poverty and discrimination. The construct of HT consolidates such experiences within an explanatory model designed to make plain the chain of causality linking past oppression to current dysfunction: although the deleterious effects of ongoing domination are acknowledged as well, the construct of HT clearly emphasizes the persecution of prior generations (otherwise, historical events need never enter into causal consideration). In my reading of this literature, the causal force attributed to AI HT is asserted by most proponents as not just metaphorical, narrative, or discursive in origin but rather literal, material, and embodied, affording explanatory power beyond the “classic social determinants of health” for a single life course (Walters et al., 2011, p. 180).

With this theoretical background in mind, I will endeavor in the remainder of this article to, first, introduce an illuminating narrative into scholarly consideration of AI HT, and then to trace some formidable complications stemming from this narrative that challenge the coherence and viability of this increasingly popular construct.

Watches All’s war narrative

In 1901, the American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber undertook several months of fieldwork among the Gros Ventres, a northern Plains tribal group then numbering less than 1,000 individuals on the Fort Belknap Indian reservation in north-central Montana. Kroeber’s interest during this visit appears to have been comparative: alongside substantial fieldwork among the northern Arapaho of Wyoming, he wished to document the cultural forms—both shared and distinctive—that had emerged over time for each of these closely related peoples. In his subsequent report on the Gros Ventres, Kroeber (1908) included a section addressed to 19th-century warfare. The bulk of this section is comprised of the first-hand war experiences of three individuals, Black Wolf, Bull Robe, and Watches All. Watches All’s narrative stands out from the other two—and indeed from the “coup tales” recorded from various Plains reservations throughout these years—because Watches All was a woman. Estimated by Kroeber to be “probably a little older” than sixty years of age in 1901, Watches All recounted her role in the historic 1867 excursion by Gros Ventres and their allies against the Piegans east of the Cypress Hills in present-day Saskatchewan (see also H. A. Dempsey, 2003). Grinnell (1908) recorded additional details about this encounter in 1891 from three Piegan participants of the battle, through which he learned that all but one of the Piegan bands were camped together during late summer when the Gros Ventres attacked. The outcome was a rout in which Piegan warriors killed 300 of their Gros Ventre assailants during their chaotic westward flight. Warfare on this scale and with such one-sided casualties was quite exceptional in late 19th-century Plains Indian conflicts, and the Piegans subsequently commemorated this battle in an elaborate petroglyph that can be viewed today in southern Alberta (L. J. Dempsey, 2007).

Watches All’s narrative of her experiences following this encounter—presumably obtained by Kroeber in English (see Kroeber, 1907, p. 59, n. 1)—comes to just under 3,000 words in published form (Kroeber, 1908, pp. 216–221). In it, she recounted her capture and escape from the Piegans, and her eventual return to the Gros Ventre camps. The entire ordeal consumed almost a year of Watches All’s life (when she would have been about 30 years of age). Her account began with the explanation that she initially joined the Gros Ventre war party because her mother scolded her for gambling away her beads. The party ventured northward in search of Piegan camps, during which time her mother arrived with a horse for her to ride. On reaching the mountains, the scouts ascended and spotted an enemy camp in the distance, and so the party made preparations for battle. Ignoring the warnings of a “ghost” summoned that night for counsel, the entire party proceeded the following morning to engage the Piegans. A prominent Piegan leader and his wife were discovered outside the camp and killed. Then, two more Piegan men were similarly dispatched, though one first stabbed a member of the party “making a hole large enough to breathe through. We tied him around with gunny sacks.” By this time, Piegan forces had joined the fray: “I saw more people than ever before. They came like ants, and the smoke hung as over a smelter. Two of the Gros Ventre drove all of our party, even the women, against the Piegan to make them fight.” Watches All witnessed a fierce battle unfold, in which the Piegans had the upper hand. Ultimately, the Gros Ventres retreated, with those who were mounted withdrawing quickly even as those on foot were overtaken and slaughtered.

Watches All shared a mount with another woman during this flight. Their horse stepped into a hole, throwing the woman but carrying Watches All forward until it got tangled in its own bridle. A Piegan warrior raced toward Watches All and “struck me with his gun. Then he took my wrist, and I dismounted as he did. Another one came, and, after striking me too, took off my bead necklaces.” Instead of killing her, the first warrior brought her back to the Piegan camp, traversing some 30 miles over which Gros Ventre corpses were strewn. They arrived by mid-day, at which point “Everybody struck me. All day they came and hit me, and one man hit me on the forehead and nearly killed me. A Piegan woman tied up my head.” They stripped her of her elk-tooth dress, and then convened the captives to determine whether Gros Ventres had been responsible for disrespecting the corpse of their prominent leader, “who had been found in an indecent position with his wife.” Meanwhile, Watches All’s mother had escaped the battle and returned home without her daughter. Upon learning that Watches All had been captured by the Piegans, her father instructed his wife to “Go and bring my daughter, or I will kill you.” Thus, her mother returned to the Piegan camp in search of Watches All, whereupon the man who had captured Watches All—a warrior named No Chief—declared that her mother’s life was to be spared and that he would take Watches All as one of his wives; another Piegan took her mother as a wife. Shortly thereafter, a conflict erupted between the two men who had originally captured Watches All as to which of them held legitimate claim to her. During the dispute, Watches All attested to No Chief’s claim: “Then the other one tried to kill me. Some Piegan women hid me.” Soon thereafter the Piegans broke camp. Under No Chief’s vigilant protection, Watches All was sheltered from the “many people who wanted to kill me.”

At the new camp, No Chief arranged for Watches All and her mother to flee on horseback, but the plan faltered. The following morning a grieving man called for the Gros Ventre captives to be killed, “crying, ‘Bring out all the captives. I will put them on my son’s grave.’ Then the women hid me. The other Gros Ventre captives were also hidden. Fourteen of them were saved, but four were killed.” The spoils of victory were then publicly displayed and war honors conferred on the Piegans who had earned them. By now, No Chief explained to Watches All that “if anyone wants to buy you from me, I will sell you.” A new man exchanged Watches All for two horses, and kept her safe from those who “still tried to kill me.” The band subsequently arrived at a fort on the Yellowstone River, where U.S. soldiers asked the Piegans to “sell them all their slaves.” In the face of internal disagreement about this prospect, none of the captives were “sold.” Instead, Watches All found a functional role in her new husband’s household: “I always took care of my husband’s little boy, and did my work, and got along well.” A White man offered to buy her from her husband. Watches All dissuaded the man because she “wanted to return home” and, fortunately, her husband did not accede to the sale. During this time, another female captive negotiated for her release, departing “after tanning ten hides” for her husband. Watches All wintered with the Piegans, and recounted various details of her band’s movements and activities. Then, an incident related to the stinginess of her mother’s husband led the man’s Piegan wife to advise her mother that “You and your daughter are living poorly. You had better run off.” The women fashioned an escape plan that was nearly thwarted: “Then my husband whipped me because he thought that I would run off. He told me not to sleep all night, but to sit up straight. Toward morning, while my two sisters slept, I ran out.”

She found her mother and together they journeyed stealthily away from the camp, hiding during the day and traveling on foot through thunderstorms at night. Careful to avoid other people along their eastward journey, they soon reached the Missouri River. They witnessed occasional steamboats moving along the river, one of which was headed upstream to the west: “My mother wanted us to get on it and go back to Fort Benton, as she wanted to sell me to the whites. Then I held my mother fast in the brush, for I did not want to go.” Knowing that Piegans frequented the fort, and fearing recapture, Watches All forcibly resisted her mother’s wishes: “I got out my knife and tried to kill my mother, because I did not want to go.” With one robe between them and their moccasins wearing away, they continued downriver, avoiding a slumbering bear. Then another steamboat arrived, stopping nearby. They saw a Gros Ventre and a Crow woman aboard, and called out. The boat ferried them across the Missouri to a saloon and store where some Crows were camped. The Crow women received them compassionately, and the storekeeper and an Army officer provisioned them with whiskey and food. The Gros Ventre woman they had met on the steamboat was the storekeeper’s wife, and together they ventured away from the settlement to harvest cottonwood sap. While out, they encountered a party of hostile Sioux and ran for their lives back to the store. The Sioux subsequently killed a White man who was out sawing wood for the steamboats and “laid this man in the fire and burned him up, so that only his legs were found.” Later, once her mother became weary of staying at the settlement, they departed in the company of the Gros Ventre leader Bull Lodge, trailing along the Milk River until Watches All arrived safely home to the Gros Ventre camps.

Clearly, Watches All’s war narrative is rife with happenings that would be readily classified today as traumatogenic. Indeed, contemporary mental health professionals would likely presume that she suffered from PTSD as a consequence of these experiences. With regard to AI HT, however, the interesting question here is not the likelihood of diagnosable PTSD (or even the larger question of the transhistoricism of the PTSD construct), but rather the downstream determinants of current health and mental health disparities among Watches All’s descendants 145 years later (although it is important to note that causal accounts of intergenerational transmission—especially those that are materialist or biological—would seem to actually depend on bona fide ancestral experiences of pathological traumatic reactions). In short, the central question is whether Watches All’s 1867–1868 captivity among the Piegans qualifies as a bona fide instance of AI HT relative to its contemporary impacts.

Implications for American Indian historical trauma

Regrettably, Kroeber (1908) provided almost no sociolinguistic context for grounding an authoritative contemporary interpretation of Watches All’s narrative. He provided no information, for example, as to the conditions that might have occasioned Watches All’s account or the audience that may have been present for the telling (and its reactions as they listened to these words). The only frame suggested in the text is the narrative’s appearance alongside the two men’s accounts of their battle exploits under the heading “War Experiences of Individuals.” Even in the absence of such desirable contextual information, however, Watches All’s account seems surprisingly accessible, perhaps deceptively so. Especially for those engaged with the mental health field, it would be difficult to overlook the salience of various happenings in her narrative that might be classed as traumatic stressors. Traumatic stressors are events or occurrences that may result in psychological trauma for those who experience them. One widespread measure of such experiences in state-of-the-art psychiatric epidemiology assesses respondent reactions to 30 kinds of traumatic stressors, including the usual and expected experiences of combat, rape, assault, and disaster, as well as perhaps less obvious occurrences such as exposure to toxic chemicals, stalking, or the sudden unexpected death of someone close to the respondent (Mills et al., 2011). Of course, whether any given individual actually develops posttraumatic pathology in the wake of such experiences varies as a function of multiple intersecting risk factors. Nevertheless, the best available evidence indicates that AIs today suffer from disproportionately high rates of lifetime exposure to trauma (as high as 69.8%) and lifetime PTSD (as high as 22.5%) relative to the U.S. national population (with highs of 60.7% and 9.1%, respectively; Beals et al., 2005; Manson, Beals, Klein, Croy, & the AI-SUPERPFP Team, 2005; Pole, Gone, & Kulkarni, 2008; for a critique of PTSD diagnoses among AI populations, see Waldram, 2004).

In the specific case of Watches All, her account of captivity and escape contains references to multiple classes of currently recognized traumatic stressors. Combat, of course, is a prototypical traumatic stressor, which she experienced first-hand once the outnumbered Gros Ventres drove “even the women” to fight against the Piegan onslaught. Captivity is also classed as such an experience, which she endured for around nine months or so. During her captivity, Watches All was physically assaulted on multiple occasions (e.g., on her arrival to the camp, “everybody struck me; all day they came and hit me”) with one man rendering her a blow so forceful that she nearly died. She lived in mortal danger for some time following her capture, so much so that her first Piegan husband evidently grew weary of trying to protect her. She was married to men who obtained that right through capture or purchase; although Watches All did not mention sexual violation, this was not unheard of among captive women on the northern Plains during this period (H. A. Dempsey, 2003). Her eventual escape in the company of her mother many months later placed her at the mercy of the elements in the face of increasingly desperate deprivation (with food, water, and clothing in short supply). During this sojourn, serious conflict erupted between the two women when it became clear that Watches All’s mother wished to “sell me to the whites”; her attempt to kill her own mother likely prevented her return to captivity. When at last they enjoyed the relative security of a trading post, she was nearly chased down by a Sioux war party that subsequently murdered and mutilated an associate of the settlement. Thus, upon her eventual return home, Watches All may well have contended with psychological difficulties in the wake of these experiences from then until her death some four decades later.

Again, however, the construct of AI HT is superfluous for reflecting the posttraumatic distress evident in the lifetime of a single individual; indeed, the mental health professions already recognize PTSD as an established means for identifying and describing this. Rather, HT was intended to delineate the contemporary impact on living AIs of the traumatic experiences of their ancestors. Thus, if the legacy of the Holocaust might be passed along to children of survivors as evidenced by increased vulnerability to psychiatric problems—above and beyond the usual “social determinants” experienced first-hand by these descendants through unspecified processes of secondary transmission—then based on the formulation of AI HT as described by its proponents it is at least reasonable to consider what intergenerational impact a 9-month period of captivity may have had on Watches All’s living descendants some five to seven generations later. In sum, the case of Watches All’s war experiences—regardless of how anomalous these may have been relative to the lives of Plains Indian women more generally at that time—invites scrutiny at the conceptual level as to whether such experiences, taken together, might indeed qualify as an instance of HT that merits serious consideration as an explanation for contemporary distress among AIs today. In this regard, Watches All’s ordeal appears to depart in substantial ways from the stock exemplars of AI HT, complicating extant conceptualizations of this construct in formidable ways (at least as it has been formulated and promoted thus far by its scholarly advocates). In the remainder of this article I will consider four domains of AI HT in which these complications arise, subsequently tracing the resultant implications of these for the coherence and viability of the construct.

Concluding reflections

Drawing on the warfare and captivity narrative of Watches All, I have endeavored to examine the assumptions and assertions of those who have articulated and promoted the discourse of AI HT for basic clarity and coherence in their theorization of these postulated posttraumatic processes. In so doing, I have asked a seemingly straightforward question: does Watches All’s 1867–1868 captivity among the Piegans and harrowing escape to her own people qualify as a bona fide instance of AI HT relative to its contemporary impacts? Owing to a host of complications that Watches All’s narrative poses for the construct of HT as currently theorized, the answer to this question is far from self-evident and remains debatable either way. If we allow that her experiences do in fact qualify in terms of their contemporary causal impacts as a legitimate instance of AI HT, then we necessarily expand the domain of the construct well beyond what its proponents had in mind when attributing its origins to genocide and other forms of colonial perpetration. Alternately, if instead we accept that her experiences do not in fact qualify in terms of their contemporary causal impacts as a legitimate instance of AI HT, then the interpretive grounds for reliably differentiating between historical experiences that respectively do and do not yield intergenerational vulnerability to health disparities appear to be arbitrary (with wholesale dismissal of any intergenerationally transmitted risks that might result from mass violence between AIs). In sum, on the basis of the foregoing analysis, it appears indisputable that AI HT as currently conceived serves as a poor explanatory model for contemporary AI health disparities. This is so for at least two reasons.

First, the construct appears to lack coherence in the face of simple but critical consideration. Specifically, in examining questions of contingency, recency, complexity, and colonialism, I have reviewed four sets of complications surrounding the construal of Watches All’s captivity experiences as an instance of AI HT relative to their contemporary impacts. Taken together, these complications reveal a striking dearth of theoretical diligence that has resulted in oversimplified and overgeneralized uses of history to account for present-day realities in AI communities (an unfortunate trend noted in the mental health literature about AIs in Waldram’s [2004] book-length analysis). Second, as a result of this lack of coherence, the construct necessarily fails to provide incremental explanatory power for contemporary AI health disparities. More specifically, we need not reference colonization history to account for contemporary trauma in Indian Country, just as we need not invoke psychological trauma to account for the ongoing impacts of colonization history. With regard to the former, no one has thus far persuasively demonstrated that the visibly prevalent traumatic pathologies of Indian Country actually require historical explanation when the prevalence of violence and trauma remains disproportionately high in far too many AI reservation communities (Gone & Trimble, 2012; Manson et al., 2005)—in fact, such attention to historically distant events and affairs actively threatens to displace our current focus on these epidemic levels of violence. With regard to the latter, it is perfectly possible to account for the contemporary impacts of colonization on AI communities (in specific, local, and historically nuanced terms, of course) without centering or privileging traumatic stress as the most interesting, important, or enduring outcome of these complex processes of historical subjugation—in fact, such attention to the psychosocial sequelae of traumatic experience necessarily constrains the range of AI subject positions to those associated with vulnerability, distress, and disability (Maxwell, 2014; for a nuanced alternative, see O’Nell, 1996).

If the viability of AI HT for explaining contemporary health disparities in Indian Country is negligible, then what precisely is fueling such enthusiasm for AI HT? I propose that, rather than offering additional explanatory power, the construct of AI HT instead appears to function as a powerful moral rhetoric of rather recent refinement that implicates Euro-American conquest and colonization in the onset and maintenance of pervasive and ongoing AI psychosocial problems. In principle, I do not object to this framing; indeed, I have routinely attempted to carefully—and with specificity and nuance—substantiate this critical (and political) attribution in my own work. I strongly object, however, to the essentialist implications that many or most contemporary AIs are traumatized—wounded, weakened, disabled—by history, and that many or most AI experiences of colonization—including adjustment to and resilience in the face of these processes—were more uniform than diverse in terms of their past impacts on indigenous communities throughout North America. Moreover, I worry that locating the sources of AI distress in past generations displaces vigilant attention—and resultant action—from the ongoing structural inequalities that systematically disadvantage Indian Country today (effecting what sociologists refer to as a medicalization of the social [Conrad, 1992]). Finally, I wonder what is to become of future generations of AIs who, as a consequence of our current rhetorical tactics, may similarly persist in lambasting the stock figure of the colonial oppressor in service to simplistic and polarized race relations, in which all previous generations of Euro-Americans are presumed to have been guilty of oppressing AIs, and in which no previous generations of AIs are presumed to have been guilty of oppressing others throughout their own histories. In the end, no matter how useful historical context might be for properly explicating AI mental health problems today, the construct of AI HT appears to caricature and distort more than it illuminates and explains, and at probable cost to future AI promise and potential.