"Wagon Train to the stars"

“A Cuchi Moya!”—Star Trek’s Native AmericansThe only ethno-racial group the program addresses in non-defamiliarized form is not African Americans (the largest “racial minority” in the United States) or Latinos (the fastest-growing “minority”) but Native Americans, a group with minimal visibility and demographic impact, yet of considerable cultural presence. Star Trek’s choice of Native Americans becomes even more interesting when one takes into consideration that the program explicitly hails from the cultural tradition of the Western—both Roddenberry’s oft-quoted description of Trek as “Wagon Train to the stars” and TOS’s and STNG’s designation of space as the “final Frontier” in their respective title sequences evidence this cultural association. “Indians” emerge from this context as a group that evokes a highly idealized and distorted image of one period in American history, mostly set in the 19th century, that mainstream American culture nostalgically yearns for as a cultural scenario that epitomizes “America” like no other. On the other hand, however, Native Americans also represent the United States’ history as a colonizer, a history the cultural narratives of the Frontier repress just as vehemently as Star Trek represses the colonial implications in its own narrative framework of interstellar “exploration.”Comment:  It sure is interesting that Roddenberry chose "Wagon Train to the stars" as Star Trek's theme. He could've conceived the show as a United Nations or Peace Corps mission to the stars. But no...he made it explicitly American and explicitly about colonizing the frontier. You know, the Wild West inhabited by unruly Indians aliens.

The Enterprise's mission is supposedly embodied in the word "explore." But I don't recall anyone's ever comparing Captain Kirk or Picard to Captain Cook or Charles Darwin. Wagon trains didn't explore, they settled--on land that wasn't theirs. For every "strange new world" the Enterprise encountered, it helped the Euro-American Federation further its presence on familiar old worlds.

Suppose the Federation found an "uninhabited" world and set up an outpost there. Then suppose it learned the planet was already inhabited by an undiscovered race. Or it was previously explored by another race (e.g., the Klingons) and declared part of their empire. Would the Federation withdraw its outpost without a fight? Has the Federation ever withdrawn voluntarily from a planet it claimed in Star Trek history?

For more on the subject, see America's Cultural Roots.

Below:  The Federation's wagon trains assimilate empty or "unused" space. Resistance is futile!