Title: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
Rating: 4 Stars
When I was young, we played Cowboys and Indians, and we always wanted to be the Cowboys. We’d watch old Westerns where brown actors of various ethnicities would pretend to be Indians. We’d always root for the settlers or the cavalry in the battles against the treacherous, barbaric Indians.
Eventually we all grew up and realized that the story is not that simple. We learned about the Trail of Tears. We learned about treaties made that were broken. Even so, this more balanced history was usually told from a Western point of view.
In Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, we read a history from a completely different perspective. Much like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, here you hear voices that you never usually hear from. The history is told from the perspective of Native Americans. White people, when mentioned, are often called by the Indian name that was given to them by the Native Americans.
The book covers Native American / White American relationships in the period of time roughly between 1860 to 1890.
Spoiler alert: Things don’t end well for the Native Americans.
This book outlines it in deep, depressing detail. It wasn’t just one treaty, It wasn’t just one tribe. It wasn’t just one part of the country. It wasn’t just one presidential administration. It didn’t matter if the tribes were peaceful or warlike. It didn’t matter if the tribes were hunters or farmers.
It wasn’t like the Native American chiefs were idiots. They understood that they stood no chance against the endless swarm of white settlers and prospectors. They knew that any battles that they won would be purely tactical victories. They’d lose any real war with the US military. They knew that once the US army was after them, that their only choices were death in battle, starvation while being pursued, or death by neglect once they were placed in a reservation far from their homes.
Over and over, the US government would come to a tribe living peacefully in their native lands. For some reason, the government needed that land. Usually it was for railroads, transit for white settlers, or valuable minerals found on the land.
The government would greet the chiefs with some nonsense greetings from the Great Father back East. The government representatives would offer some shady deal to take valuable land from the Native Americans that they’d been using for centuries. The government would promise payments to the tribe. The government would promise only to take some of the land and leave the rest of the land to the tribes as long as the grass grows green.
Well, it turns out, at least during that part of history, that the grass would only grow green for a couple of years. The US government would come back soon to take even more land. In some cases, it would take all of the land and try to move the tribe completely out of their homeland.
The chiefs, to repeat, were not idiots. They often were parties to the previous agreements and knew what was agreed to. However, most of them were illiterate, so what was verbally agreed to would be different than the signed contract.
In some cases, the agreement was simply ignored. One particular agreement required something like three quarters of a tribe’s men agreement to change. There was no way that was going to happen. The US army invaded one of the tribe’s campgrounds and murdered women and children that were living there. In response, the tribe’s warriors attacked the US army. The US government then identified the tribe as hostile and just took the land from them.
Black Kettle was a chief of the Southern Cheyenne tribe. Black Kettle understood the futility of fighting the US army and, to the frustration of his more militant tribal members, consistently sought peaceful conciliation with the US government. He would proudly fly the American flag over his tipi. Shortly after signing a peace agreement and settling into the Sand Creek reservation, the 3rd Colorado Cavalry attacked the reservation and killed many women and children. He was shot in front of his tipi waving the American flag and a white flag. Later he was shot and killed by Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment in yet another attack on a peaceful village.
This was not an uncommon occurrence. Native American chiefs were captured and arrested during ostensible peace negotiations. The US army committed atrocities against women and children. Native Americans were herded onto reservations in land that they were not acclimated to. Once on the reservation, they were denied the ability to hunt. They were provided insufficient food, shelter, and clothing. Military officers or agency representatives that displayed compassion for the Native Americans were roundly criticized and routinely reassigned.
This wasn’t just a couple of tribes. The Navajo, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Apache, Kiowa, Comanche, Nez Perce, and Utes all were cheated by the US government.
In hindsight, it was clear that the Native American tribes were always going to be caught underneath the wave of white immigration. The fact that our government dealt with them in such a manner is just one more blot in our notorious history of racism.
dorkenstein 