Fugazi became the second band in this programme to meet the “I finally get to hear a band that I’ve heard of but but not heard” test. Up until this 28/5/93 show, I only really knew about Fugazi through a record sleeve. Peel opened this show with a track from their third album, In On the Kill Taker. Smallpox Champion is a history lesson set to music as it accuses the United States of having engaged in surreptitious biological warfare against Native Americans using tactics such as distributing blankets infected with smallpox at various points in their history.
The disease was always a problem for Native Americans, from the time that they first came into contact with it after the arrival of European settlers in the late 15th Century. Indeed, there is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that if Fugazi were looking for a target to criticise about the spreading of smallpox, they should be blaming Europeans rather than U S of A.
One of the most notorious examples came in 1763 as a means of relieving a siege by Native Americans of a British Army base at Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania. During a round of negotiations, the British Army made a gift to the Natives’ representatives of a pair of blankets which had been exposed to doses of smallpox. This idea was given blessing by senior figures in the British Army, who were nowhere near Fort Pitt. This incident may be what inspires lines in Smallpox Champion such as:
Give natives some blankets warm like the grave.
This is the pattern cut from the cloth.
This is the pattern designed to take you right out.
Although these incidents were recorded, historians have been wary of accrediting them as wholly deliberate or effective mainly due to a mix of a lack of written historical record kept by Native American populations before the 19th Century and developing medical knowledge recognising that early stage smallpox spread through droplets in coughs and sneezes. Only in latter stage smallpox outbreaks did objects like blankets and bedding become a potential means of catching the disease.
Where Smallpox Champion may be reserving its fury towards America is in suppositions that smallpox outbreaks of the 1830s were deliberately used as a means to decimate Native American populations. Responsibility for the Great Plains outbreak of 1837 has been laid at the door of American Fur Company. Over 17,000 Native Americans died during that outbreak and some tribes were virtually wiped out. Fugazi clearly see it as all part of a plot by White settlers to take more land and plunder the resources found on them:
Greed informs action, when action makes bold
To take all the cotton that’s cut from the stalk…
You saw what you wanted.
You took what you saw.
We know how you got it,
Your method equals wipe out.
The end of the frontier,
And all that you own.
Under the blankets of all that you’ve done…
The song ends swearing that retribution will be delivered to those who’ve wronged the Native Americans, who really were treated abominably by White man. The only consolation now is that their descendants are probably one of the few non-white groups that can’t get rounded up by ICE.
Video courtesy of XlebenverbotenX
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
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