Ulysses is the best written character in New Vegas and it's not even close. His entire character revolves around the idea of identity and existential crisis under colonialism, and it's told in such a subtle way most players miss it. I'm really tired of his character being reduced to "the bear and the bull" when he has so much to say about the themes of the entire saga.
When people think about colonialism, brutality, violence and even genocide come to mind, but we must always remember that colonialism presents also a gentler face.
This is important to always keep in mind because more often than not throughout world's history, colonized people have been forced into participating in the colonization of others. Sometimes even in the colonization of their own people. Colonialism acts as a poison as much as it acts as a hammer, deathly as both, and it deeply depends on what it needs at the moment. The Romans knew this, the Spanish Conquistadores knew this, the British Empire knew this, and many other expansionist, imperialistic powers across the world and through history knew this (being a bit loose here with the term imperialism, extending it beyond capitalism).
With this in mind, I want to first talk about the Twisted Hairs, Ulysses' tribe. As we learn in the Legion Slave Ledger:
Of particular interest is the fate of the Twisted Hair tribe of Arizona, who formed an alliance with Caesar to serve as his army's scouts during the conquest of that region. Once the Arizona wastes were pacified, the Legion turned on its erstwhile allies, stripped them of their tribal identity, and forced them into slavery. Those who resisted were crucified along the remains of Interstate 40.
Ulysses himself confirms how the assimilation of his tribe went:
Twisted Hairs are dead, lost at Dry Wells, died in Vulpes' smile. (This dialogue is also emphasized with anger in the notes.)
The Twisted Hairs were used to conquer and assimilate other tribes, and when the time came, they were consumed by the Legion. What's interesting is that we know the Twisted Hairs helped the Legion since its foundation, and that Vulpes has not always been Legion (and given his apparent age, from mid 20s to mid 30s, he couldn't have been), yet he was the one to put the Twisted Hairs' history, in Ulysses' words, to the blade. And he continues:
It is where we realized Vulpes did not approach us as equals. Where we realized the wolf had come, and we watched our history die. Now it belongs to Legion... and all the death there now belongs to them as well.
While tribes like the Ridgers or the Kaibabs were brutally erased and/or conquered, the Twisted Hairs were slowly dissolved. The colonization of the Twisted Hairs was a slow process, and when the assimilation happened it was almost seen as natural by most members. Perhaps for men like Ulysses their situation didn't change much.
The Twisted Hairs acted as scouts for Caesar, and I imagine that while Ulysses was a frumentarius, his work as a courier and his tribe's history makes me believe that he didn't act much as a saboteur or spy like other frumentarii like Picus or Vulpes, and that maybe his role was similar to Karl's, the frumentarius we find with the Great Khans. So it would be safe to assume that the White Legs were the first tribe he directly helped in assimilating in a way that echoes the creation of the Legion. But then the White Legs tried to honor Ulysses and everything came crashing down, like an epiphany:
They brought me before the campfire one night, showed me how they changed themselves, how they wore their hair now. It was like my entire dead tribe in the firelight, teeth grinning red in the dark - eager corpses, blood-covered ghosts. They... had taken my braids, the way of the Twisted Hairs, as if it showed they were like me, of me... while every knot in their braids spoke of raping, violence - and ignorance of what the knots meant. They thought to show respect... defiled it.
The memory and history of his tribe reduced to a void mimicry, now only signifying the same death and destruction that stole his people's history. Once those knots celebrated a person's history; marriage, social status, hunts, family. And Ulysses saw them being knitted one last time to celebrate the erasure of a different tribe. We as players know the New Canaanites are at least Christian even if some players don't know they're Mormons, but in the context of the game even themselves perceive themselves as a tribe.
In his holotapes we learn about how deeply affected he is by being the architect of the destruction of New Canaan. It all becomes one brutal spiral of destruction, as Joshua Graham's life of violence circles back to his home being destroyed by the same empire he helped create (In fact, since the Twisted Hairs were a powerful tribe when the Legion was still in its infancy, and Joshua was the interpreter and legate, which was also a diplomatic role, I'm sure he had a lot to do with their initial assimilation and slow erosion. Perhaps it was Vulpes the one to put the nail in the coffin, but it was Joshua the one to pave the road.) Ulysses turned the last remaining element of his tribe's history into the commemoration of a genocide. Ulysses was a victim of colonization turned into a perpetrator through the slow appropriation of his tribe's knowledge, weaponizing it against the Twisted Hairs. One could argue they were, unknowingly, the foundations of the frumentarii. His entire story, told not only in the Lonesome Road DLC, but throughout the entire game and the other three DLCs, is one of regret, anger, resentment, loss and the existential dread of becoming a post-colonial individual in a colonial world.
Ulysses and his story (and history) is the embodiment of the phrase war, war never changes, and that's why it's so important that he's the one who narrates the ending of Lonesome Road, adding to the iconic quote men/women do, through the roads they walk.
