Bury Me at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

"The Great Spirit raised both the white man and the Indian," Red Cloud said.  "I think he raised the Indian first.  He raised me in this land and it belongs to me.  The white man was raised over the great waters, and his land is over there.  Since they crossed the sea, I have given them room.  There are now white people all about me.  I have but a small spot of land left.  The Great Spirit told me to keep it."

Two days ago, on Thanksgiving, the Huffington Post ran a story about the attempt to decertify the Mashpee Wampanoag of Massachusetts as a Native American tribe.  The justification is a technical one, but the motive is as old as Columbus: the desire to claim land belonging to the Wampanoag, this time because they want to build a casino on it that is a threat to the interests of local developers.  The idea of decertifying the Wampanoag is especially ironic; it was a Wampanoag man, Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, who helped the first Pilgrims survive the winter and inspired the holiday of Thanksgiving.

When I read that story, I thought about Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I've been reading.  As Brown shows, it's the same story, over and over: the dispossessed Wampanoag, the Taino obliterated by Columbus, the forced march of the Cherokeee.  Brown's history focuses on a relatively small fraction of the history of conflict between white and native Americans: the period of 1860 to 1890, when westward expansion compelled the U.S. government to force Western tribes onto ever-smaller reservations, uprooting their ways of life, and killing thousands by violence, disease, and starvation.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is subtitled "The Indian History of the American West."  In a lot of ways it reads like a typically history book, objective to the point of dryness, but in each case the typical lens of the story is reversed so that we are asked to look at the events through the eyes of the Native Americans at the center of the conflict.  Reframed that way, the story of the American West, of political and economic expansion, becomes the nightmare of invasion and forced removal.  There are no tirades and few passages that might pass for commentary, mostly, Brown is content to let the eloquence of leaders like Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and Crazy Horse speak for itself.  But he also undermines our biases in subtle ways, like using the appellations given by Native Americans to their white military rivals: Three Stars Crook, Long Hair Custer, Old Man of the Thunder Hancock.

One of the saddest takeaways of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is that it didn't really matter what approach Native leaders took in these matters.  Brown makes clear that Native communities were deeply divided on how to respond to white removal policies; many of the stories here are about peace-seeking chiefs who are caught between the demands of the U.S. government and more military factions within their own tribe.  But whether, like Kicking Bird or Black Kettle, they argue for submission to these policies, or like Geronimo and Cochise, they are willing to fight to the death, each tribe ends up dispossessed of their lands and often violently reduced.  Peaceful tribes, like the Utes in Colorado, find that they are the victims of newspaper smear campaigns meant as a pretext to drive them out of their lands and make room for white settles.  The Nez Perce of Idaho boasted that they had never had a disagreement with white men--until the white men wanted their land.  Cheyenne chief Black Kettle raises an American flag to convince American soldiers that he wants only friendship; what he gets is the Sand Creek Massacre, in which 148 Native Americans were killed.

Someone really ought to make a movie out of the story of Modoc chief Kintpuash, who was so friendly with white ranchers around Tule Lake in Oregon that he called himself by the nickname they gave him: Captain Jack.  The government moved the Modocs to a reservation with their much larger rivals, the Klamath tribe, where they were mistreated and decided to retreat to California's Lava Beds.  Captain Jack avoided conflict at every turn, but his lieutenant Hooker Jim led an aggressive faction who mocked him so mercilessly that they extracted a promise to kill the American General, Edward Canby, when they met one-on-one.  Captain Jack went reluctantly through with his promise, made in rash anger, only to end up captured and turned over by Hooker Jim, the very man who had spurred him to do it, and later sold out the American troops.  As for the Modocs?  Most of them were forcibly moved to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma--a far cry from Tule Lake, Oregon.

At this Thanksgiving season, I'm thankful to be able to hear the stories of people I haven't known about, like Captain Jack.  And like Donegohawa, the first Native American to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and who tried to fight rampant corruption in order to keep peace in the West.  And Standing Bear, who fought in U.S. courts to be recognized as a legal person, with concomitant rights of free movement.  Standing Bear wasn't able to make the American legal system extend the ruling to the rest of his Ponca tribe on the reservation in the Indian Territory, but amid a bleak and sordid history, his is story worth remembering.  "Now, a century later," Brown writes about his subjects, "in an age without heroes, they are perhaps the most heroic of all Americans."

The book ends in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, which Brown calls the "symbolic end of Indian freedom."  Wounded Knee was the culmination of a pan-Native syncretic religious movement called the Ghost Dance, which promised to erase white men from the United States and revive thousands of Native dead.  It was essentially a Christian movement, Brown notes, though the U.S. government could not recognize it as such.  It was also, in its appeal to many Native cultures, self-evidently a response to the wholesale decimation of Native peoples.  The U.S. killed Sitting Bull because they were afraid he might lend his prestige to the movement, and they massacred hundreds of innocent, unarmed people.  Its symbolism comes from, beyond the massive loss of life, the refutation of this religious vision.

Three years after Brown wrote Bury Me at Wounded Knee, a group of activists in the American Indian Movement captured Wounded Knee in an attempt to force political change.  I don't know enough about it to be able to call it heroic; it probably was.  But it's a reminder that, despite the tragic success of the United States' policy of forced removal and eradication, Native people are still here, and their autonomy is still drastically limited.  I hope that, after the events of the last couple of years at Standing Rock, white Americans like me won't let their consciousness of Native issues drop away.  We can start by defending the rights of people like the Mashpee Wampanoag, and Bury Me at Wounded Knee should be required reading.