There is something deeply unsettling about the name of an American missile. When a Tomahawk leaves a warship to strike a target hundreds of miles away, it carries with it, almost unnoticed, a fragment of Native American history. The tomahawk was originally a type of axe used by various Indigenous peoples of North America. The word itself comes from an Algonquian language, probably Powhatan. Four centuries later, it refers to a sophisticated weapon capable of destroying a target with extraordinary precision.
But the Tomahawk is merely the tip of a much larger tradition. Apache attack helicopters, Chinook transport aircraft, Black Hawks, the former Sioux helicopters, and the Comanche and Cheyenne projects: the American military has assembled what amounts to an entire collection of names drawn from the history of Native American nations. And this is no coincidence.
Contrary to what one might imagine, this practice did not begin forty-five years ago, in the early 1980s. It dates back to the aftermath of the Second World War, and its roots go even further back.
At the time, the U.S. Army was looking for evocative names for its new helicopters. General Hamilton Howze reportedly believed that early designations such as Hoverfly and Dragonfly lacked character. According to a historical account published by the U.S. Army, he wanted names that suggested speed, agility, endurance, and the ability to surprise an enemy. The combat tactics traditionally associated with Native American warriors seemed to him perfectly suited to this vision.
That is how the Bell H-13 acquired the name Sioux.
The choice was particularly loaded with history. Sioux warriors had participated in the Native American victory at Little Bighorn in 1876, where the U.S. Seventh Cavalry suffered a defeat that would become legendary. In other words, the United States Army chose to name one of its aircraft after the very people who had once defeated its own soldiers.
In 1969, this practice became official policy. Army Regulation AR 70-28 established that U.S. Army aircraft should receive names or terms associated with Native American peoples and chiefs. The Bureau of Indian Affairs participated in the selection of these names.
This was therefore not simply the whim of a few engineers or a marketing exercise dreamed up by weapons manufacturers. It was a deliberate institutional policy. Although the regulation has since been rescinded, the tradition has survived.
One important distinction must nevertheless be made: not all American missiles and bombs bear Native American names. The tradition primarily concerns U.S. Army helicopters.
The Tomahawk missile belongs to a different story, that of the United States Navy. Entering service in the early 1980s, its name refers to the traditional axe rather than to a particular tribe. There was also an experimental missile program called Navaho as early as the 1950s.
Native American names therefore appeared across several branches of the American military-industrial establishment, without ever becoming a universal naming rule.
But the most uncomfortable question remains: why such military fascination with peoples whom the United States spent so long fighting?
The history of American expansion was hardly a peaceful encounter between civilizations. It was also a history of forced displacement, broken treaties, confiscated lands, devastated populations, and massacres. Entire nations were pushed onto reservations as American territory expanded westward. The federal army was one of the principal instruments of that conquest.
And yet, only a few decades later, the names of those same peoples had become synonymous with courage and power in the American military imagination.
The paradox is striking.
Warriors once portrayed as formidable enemies were retrospectively transformed into models of bravery. What had previously been perceived as a threat became an admirable quality. What had to be defeated became a symbol worthy of celebration.
This transformation was not merely historical. It was also profoundly cultural.
Western films, popular literature, and Hollywood representations long perpetuated a simplified image of the Native American warrior: silent, courageous, elusive, capable of appearing and disappearing into the landscape.
It was an often caricatured representation, reducing extraordinarily diverse societies to their supposed fighting abilities.
And yet, it was precisely this image that inspired the military tradition.
The army was not seeking to tell the story of Apache or Sioux cultures, their languages, their institutions, or their spiritual traditions. It wanted names that evoked tactical qualities.
It was borrowing an image of the warrior rather than paying tribute to an entire civilization.
The historical irony becomes even more striking when an Apache helicopter crosses the sky.
The Apache peoples resisted American expansion in the Southwest for decades. Geronimo became one of the most famous figures of that resistance.
Today, their name designates one of the most recognizable attack helicopters in the United States military.
Is this a sincere tribute, or a form of cultural appropriation?
It would be too simplistic to claim that all Native Americans necessarily regard it as an insult.
Some Indigenous representatives have participated in military naming ceremonies. In June 2012, Lakota elders blessed UH-72 Lakota helicopters during a ceremony on the Standing Rock Reservation.
The U.S. Army presents such events as recognition of Indigenous history and of Native Americans’ service in the armed forces.
But that recognition does not erase the historical contradictions.
A nation can be honored while its name continues to be used within a symbolic framework it did not necessarily choose.
A name is not merely a decoration painted onto a machine. It carries memories, suffering, victories, defeats, and sometimes an identity that remains very much alive.
In 2026, the tradition continues to evolve. The U.S. Army unveiled the name MV-75 Cheyenne for its new vertical-lift aircraft during a ceremony involving representatives of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations.
Proof that this custom, born in the previous century, is far from being merely a historical curiosity.
Ultimately, there are two ways of understanding this story.
The first is to see the American military as paying tribute to former adversaries whose courage and abilities it eventually came to recognize.
The second is to interpret it as an extraordinary act of symbolic appropriation: after conquering Indigenous territories, American power also incorporated their names into its own military mythology.
These interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The intention to honor may be genuine, while the historical paradox remains entirely intact.
Behind the names Apache, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche are peoples who are not merely memories from old Western movies.
They are nations, communities, cultures, and languages that still exist today, despite centuries of dispossession and resistance.
And perhaps that is where the true strangeness of this American story lies.
By transforming these names into symbols of warfare, we almost forget that they belong, first and foremost, to human beings.
America took their lands. It fought their warriors. At times, it attempted to erase their cultures. Then it gave their names to its machines of war.
A way of honoring them, certainly, in the minds of those who established the tradition.
But also one of history’s bitterest ironies: the peoples once targeted for subjugation have become, even in the vocabulary of their former adversaries, symbols of strength and freedom.
