The book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” has been on a bookshelf in my home for a while. It's one of many that's sat waiting for me to “have the time” (i.e.make it a priority) to read. After reviewing my stash of books to select one to read recently, the book caught my attention, thankfully.
Anyone who has read it and didn't have their heart broken over and over again while doing so, must simply have no heart at all.
It may seem like three decades too late to some, but here, for what it's worth, is my review of this major historical book that was among the first to start taking the whitewash off of the history of this country's native peoples.
It starts with a summation of the experience of Native Americans in North America, beginning with Christopher Columbus' first encounter with the Tainos on the Island of San Salvador in 1492. Columbus was so impressed with the civility of the Tainos, who greeted him and his men warmly and gave them gifts, that he reported to the King and Queen of Spain that “there is not in the world a better nation.” A little more than three centuries later, the Tainos, the peaceable people first encountered by Columbus when he and his crew made land on San Salvador, were no more. Their agricultural society, later replaced by plantations, with the Tainos used as slaves, had been completely obliterated by the early 1800's.
The book chronicles the diaspora of Native American tribes and the double-dealing, dishonesty and horrors that became America's own Holocaust story. It was a story where our own government and military were complicit in an attempt to extinguish peace-loving peoples with whom it had signed treaty after treaty, most of which were inaccurate representations of what had been negotiated or which were simply abrogated or ignored completely by the U.S. government and its representatives.
The author methodically brings the reader through the numerous deceits of government officials, who would negotiate with various tribal leaders, like Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota. Negotiators would agree to one thing, and then officials would write down different terms and have tribal leaders sign something different than had been negotiated. Red Cloud was stunned, on a visit to the White House, to learn of the written contents of a treaty he had negotiated. The written account was nowhere close to what he himself had verbally agreed to.
One of the anecdotes recounted in the book sounds like it could come right out of present-day Washington.
It revolves around the story of President Ulysses Grant's Secretary of the Interior, a Native American from the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois League named Donehogowa who changed his name to Ely Parker in order to get an education and advance himself (his efforts at becoming a lawyer were quashed for the simple reason of his being a Native American which, apparently, at the time, automatically disqualified one from even being able to take the bar exam).
In any case, Parker, as the first-ever Native American Interior Secretary was actually pretty effective, as President Grant had hoped, in bridging the gap between the government and the Native Peoples, at least for a while. In fact, Parker actually made some significant headway at bringing about more mediation, and peace, between Native Americans, the U.S. military and the U.S. government. Unlike his predecessors, Parker tried to use his position in the Interior Department to actually mend relations between Native Americans and the U.S. government. Prior to that, the Department of Interior was, basically, nothing more than an abjectly corrupt cesspool for pure political patronage. Unfortunately, Parker only lasted about two and a half years in that position, because a lot of those folks who were put off about having their political patronage taken away from them organized and began a sustained effort to get rid of Parker. Parker's opponents had enough support in the halls of Congress to get Congress to harass Parker with incessant Congressional hearings. While the very committee harassing Parker failed to come up with any actual legal charges against him to warrant his removal, they did achieve their overall objective. Parker, essentially, gave up after two and a half years, exhausted by the constant Congressional efforts to harangue and harass him. (Darrell Issa would have been right at home in that Congress).
The one thing that struck me while reading through this heart-breaking plight of the Native American folks is how pervasive was the use of the word “peace” throughout the entire process. “Peace treaty” after “peace treaty” was struck, again and again, with one tribe and another and then some of the same tribes again and again.
In fact, it seems, in retrospect, that the more the word “peace” was injected into the dialogue and conversations between the U.S. government's agents and Native Americans, the more warfare, brutality, debauchery and genocide there seemed to have been, especially during the period which was covered most extensively by the book, written by historian Dee Brown, during the “Indian Wars” period of the 1800's.
It seems truly to be one of the greatest paradoxes of human history that while that massive barbarism and genocide was underway against entire groups of people, the U.S. government and its agents were constantly engaged in talks with various leaders seeking so-called “peace treaties.”
Sometimes these peace treaties would actually last for a while, but only for up to a few years at most.
When Native Americans agreed to peace, they always seemed to mean it. And then, something would come along to show them that what had allegedly been negotiated by the U.S. government and military agents was a fluid thing, at least to many military agents and white settlers.
The author was a man named Dorris Alexander Brown, who went by the name “Dee,” and used the name Dee Brown on the book itself. Brown was 62 years old when the book hit the best-seller list in 1970. He was an historian and novelist. The only real connection to Native Americans was his friendship with a Native American as a boy (a “Creek”) and the fact that he met a Native American baseball player named Chief Yellow Horse, a pitcher. His experience with the Creek boy and the kindness of Yellow Horse “caused him to reject the portrayals of Indian peoples as violent and backward, which dominated American popular culture at the time,” according to Wikipedia. He was born in Alberta, Louisiana and raised in Ouachita County, Arkansas. He lived in Little Rock at the time of his death Dec. 12, 2002 at the age of 94.
The attitude by many toward Native Americans during the 1800's can be summed up by a U.S. general at the time, who is quoted as having said that “the only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” which, when you think about it isn't that much different than Adolph Hitler's views toward Jewish people. But, somehow, this attempt to exterminate Native Americans, at least by some military leaders of the day, wasn't enough. General Philip Sheridan led the charge in a deliberate attempt to exterminate all buffalo, as well. It's estimated that 3.7 million buffalo were killed by white soldiers and settlers during this time, usually slaughtered for no purpose other than to kill them. Native Americans are estimated to have killed about 150,000 during that same period, but, in their case, it was to survive, using every possible part of the slain buffalo for practical reasons, like food, skins and a wide variety of other purposes. When asked about Sheridan's views of the white settlers' slaughter of buffalo, Sheridan was quoted as having said: “Let them kill skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.”
A good example of the plight of Native Americans can be seen in what happened to the Nez Perce, a peaceful tribe in the U.S. Northwest. They were known for never having taken revenge on white settlers for stealing their cattle or infringing on their land, as had happened to so many other tribes. Military leaders sought to relocate them from the Wollowa Valley in what is now northeastern Oregon to the Lapwai reservation in what is now Idaho, so settlers could have access to their land and the gold that it offered. Two years after President Grant promised the Nez Perce that they could stay on the Wallowa Valley land of their ancestors forever, he issued a new proclamation opening the Wallowa Valley land to white settlers.
The book chronicles the trials and tribulations of tribe after tribe, leading up to one of the worst cases of mass genocide in world history.
The climax of the book is the massacre of hundreds of Native Americans at Chankpe Opi Wakpala, the creek known as Wounded Knee at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation which, like so much of Native American history, occurred as the culmination of a variety of factors, including deceit by the U.S. government, distrust by U.S. soldiers and misinterpretation (deliberate and otherwise) of the passive intentions of Native Americans.
For those who think they have an accurate, objective perspective on Native American history in this country, the book is worth a re-read. For those who haven't taken the time to learn more, this will be a real eye-opener about what some folks have described as America's own Holocaust.