The Discards

In the early twentieth century, the United States government promised protection to the Yakima people. What it delivered was theft. The Discards is a searing collection of firsthand observations and investigations into the broken promises made to Indigenous peoples. Written by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, an adopted member of the Yakama Nation, these pages document the systematic plunder of tribal lands, the diversion of water rights that had sustained communities for generations, and the bureaucratic cruelty of an administration tasked with civilizing a people it was instead destroying. Through specific cases like Louis Mann and Simon Goudy, McWhorter exposes the human cost of policy: families displaced, elders betrayed, hope extinguished. This is not historical fiction or distant analysis. It is testimony from someone who lived inside these communities, who watched the Indian Bureau fail the people it claimed to serve. The discards of the title are not just the lands and waters taken, but the lives deemed expendable in the machinery of conquest. For readers seeking to understand the roots of contemporary Indigenous struggles, this book offers an urgent, unflinching witness from a moment when the theft was still happening, when the records were still being kept.