SPOKANE, Wash. – A small plot of land in Airway Heights marks a bloody battle 166 years ago in which the military mounted an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Indigenous peoples of the Spokane region.
The Battle of Spokane Plains monument is an unassuming pyramid-shaped structure, but it marks the brutal history of September 1858, in which Colonel George Wright and US military forces murdered, burned and hanged members of the Spokane, Yakima and Coeur d’Alene tribes.
“Far too many people do not know in the City of Spokane that there were battles here, between tribal people and soldiers, soldiers coming to kill, tribal people taking up arms to defend women, children, land and their way of life,” Spokane tribe member Warren Seyler said.
Wright organized an attempt to politically and economically devastate the peoples who populated the Inland northwest in the mid-1800s, which resulted in a string of quasi-extrajudicial …