Like most of you, I’ve been veering between rage and despair over Ukraine.

I’m even resorting to movie fantasies to comfort myself–like when Diana rescues the village from the Germans in Wonder Woman–another writer saw that scene evocative of what was then happening in Syria, with the assistance of the Russians– or, far more violent, envisioning the First Air Cav of Apocalypse Now’s Robert Duvall delivering a spectacular napalm strike on the Russian columns as they head east toward the Donbas.

I can be a bloodthirsty little bastard when I’m angry.

Even moreso when I’m helpless.

We seem, among world figures and self-important commentators, to be quibbling over the term “genocide.” The term applies here, to what’s being done to the people of Ukraine. I’ve written about genocide, at some length, in our own history, and some of it involved Arroyo Grande settlers.

–In 1862, when the government, which had already reduced the size of the Woodland Sioux reservation in Minnesota, thus depriving them of game, also withheld the reservation’s meat and grain allotment, a war broke out. It began with some hungry young men stealing a hen’s eggs from a farmer in Meeker County–where my Irish ancestors, no strangers to hunger, later homesteaded–and ended with the largest mass execution in American history, of thirty-eight Sioux fighters, hanged in Mankato. Over three hundred had originally been sentenced to hang until Lincoln intervened. John Rice, who build a home from Los Berros stone on Myrtle Street, was a soldier who witnessed that execution as a member, mounted that day, of F Company, 10th Minnesota Infantry.

The hangings happened the day after Christmas, 1862. The Sioux sang as they climbed the scaffold and stood on the plank that would be collapsed on the signal of a settler whose family had been murdered. Their hands were bound, but the condemned men tried desperately to touch each other in that final moment.

One of the fighters who died that day was named Chaksha. A White woman had intervened on his behalf at one of the perfunctory military tribunals because he had saved the life of the woman and her children as they were about to be killed by Chaksha’s comrades. But a mistake in record-keeping killed Chaksha. The same mistake, thanks to the similarity in names, spared the life of Chaksey-etay, a Sioux condemned of raping and murdering another woman.

When a warder went into the Mankato jail on December 27 calling Chaksha’s name for his release, a voice called out simply, “You hanged him yesterday.”

–In the Treaty of Laramie in 1858, the Powder River Country was promised to the Lakota and Cheyenne until the end of time. Then gold was discovered there. When miners began getting picked off, the Army sent in a punitive expedition that included two Arroyo Grande settlers, James Dowell and Thomas Keown, under the command of a general, Patrick Connor, who promised “to kill every male Indian over the age of twelve.” It didn’t work out that way, especially when, on the first night of the expedition, Dowell and Keown’s commander pitched camp between two villages whose leaders were Red Cloud and Sitting Bull.

“The Sioux fell on them like angry badgers,” one historian wrote. Dowell and Keown survived the expedition, but just barely, and as infantrymen. They’d had to eat their horses.

–Harrison Marion Bussell, First Colorado Cavalry, is buried in our cemetery. It was only a matter of luck that his company was left behind at Fort Lyon when a detachment of cavalry, under Col. John Chivington, fell on a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864. The horse soldiers from the volunteer regiment that accompanied the First mutilated the genitals of the dead to bring home souvenirs–the troopers of the First, regular army soldiers, had to be forcibly restrained from opening fire on the volunteers, who killed, over the course of eight hours, 230 women and children.

The volunteers killed at close range. The First Colorado–Bussell’s comrades–had brought mountain howitzers along for the expedition and when they opened fire on the camp, witnesses noted that the shells detonated harmlessly in mid-air, high above the Native Americans who were going to die anyway. The soldiers of the First had cut the shells’ fuses short.

The leader at Sand Creek, Black Kettle, would escape. Six years later, on the Washita, he was flying an American flag, a gift from President Lincoln, outside his tipi when Custer’s Seventh–the regimental band was playing the Seventh’s theme, “Garryowen,” the merry old Irish drinking song– rode into the village and began killing everyone in sight. Black Kettle was among them.

And then there’s Wounded Knee. This is from a piece I wrote eight years ago.

So don’t call what’s happening in Ukraine–the extermination, both haphazard and deliberate–of a people considered “inferior”–anything other than genocide. Don’t bullshit me. Don’t equivocate.

I know genocide when I see it.