[Places #1] Wounded Knee

 

 

 

[Google Images]


*an excerpt from the film*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irjRMmQ1n-A

*Henry Dawes: This isn't about money, gentlemen,

this is about human beings.

And when you make an agreement,

you have a solemn obligation

- to fulfill-

- In spite of this atrocity...

President Grant: I still believe that setting the Indians

on the course to civilization

best ensures their survival.

Now, do you or do you not agree?

Henry Dawes: Yes, sir. I do.

President Grant: Then you can't deny

that there's no saving the Sioux

unless we compel them

to give up their way of life

and settle

on the reservation.

General Sherman: I'll say it till

my tongue bleeds-

If we're ever going to claim

what we bought from the French

and whooped

the Mexicans for,

it's going to mean

killing Indians.*

Blogger comment: [an excerpt from 'Wachichu', blog post, October, 2014]

     .... I listened intently. 'What a marvelous story, full of promise, and yet also full of sadness......'
'It is a metaphor for our peoples. We have wandered so far from Iktomi's web in pursuit of the white man's dream of occupation, I'm not sure how we get back to our original destiny....'
'Sounds like a spiritual dilemma,' I affirmed.
'Mostly a historical one. As early as 1790, the Indian Intercourse Act stated that the sale of Indian lands was invalid unless sanctioned by a public treaty...which, of course the US government had to approve....'
'As early as that?' I asked.
'This country was still a child, a child with thirteen grandparents. Some people in my tribe say that the Act of 1790 marked the end of the white man's vision for America...'
'And replaced it with?' I continued.
'Greed. Or, if you prefer, lebensraum. A blueprint for owning land....any land. My land. Your land. 'This land is your land.....your land is my land.' A beginning to what was later to become 'eminent domain'. Some thirty years later, we were, in 1823, given what they called tribal rights, but it became clear to our peoples that any such rights were spun around the interminable webs of the federal law.....'

I was quickly becoming Blog-interested.
I ordered another round. He was just getting into his historical stride.
'Subsequent treaties between our peoples and the white man simply became a kind of pretext for nullifying our land titles and opening these same lands for white settlement. Occupation of our 'lands' on the backs of the law. That was the beginning of what is known as reservations**.... We had become trapped in a web of the white man's making.....'

He was silent for a moment.
'We Native Americans....we have never been a nation. We were always a nation of nations....and Iktomi the trickster never found a need to spin lawyers from our web. We had no understanding of owning the land....rather, the land owned us. 
But I digress. In 1870 the white man ended the practice of making treaties with our peoples. This was quickly followed by the Dawes Act, whereby we were encouraged to own small tracts of land so we could follow civilized agrarian practices instead of hunting, fishing and gathering. We had no say, you understand, where those tracts would be, because they kept on changing. We were also allotted some land for grazing purposes. But with the demise of the plains' buffalo, it was as if the white man had killed our vision, for all time.....'

I winced, perceptibly.
'So, let me see if I understand, ' I continued. 'First, the government said that your land [which you didn't think was your land in the first place] was not really your land to think of....and since it really wasn't your land anyway, they then moved you off the good tribal lands as preoccupation after preoccupation came along--gold, railroads, buffalo hunts....'
'That indeed is the gist, my friend. Let me also say that, after the Dawes Act, our peoples lost some 90,000,000 acres of tribal land. You do the math. That is a lot of land. And it wasn't until some fifty years later that the Indian Reorganization Act started to disavow the practice....'
I grew quiet. 
Strangely quiet. Somehow I knew where this was going.

I broke my own silence. 'So, in 1890, when the Battle of Wounded Knee took place...'
He interrupted me in mid sentence.
'Wounded Knee was a massacre. It was no battle. Almost two hundred of our peoples--many defenceless women and children--were slaughtered there. Our refusal to surrender our Indian-ness, to succumb to the bad forces, to change our ways of life, broke both the DreamCatcher and the inner web.'
He paused for a moment, closed his eyes, then intoned: 

'Black Elk, a medicine man, said it best: "I did not then know how much was ended. When I look back from the high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch......And I see that something else died there in the bloody mud. It was buried in the blizzard--a people's dream died there....and it was a beautiful dream......."'


Wounded Knee was where our conversation ended. 
Just as the Lakota dream had ended.
As I said previously......December arrived early in Philadelphia this year.
December, 1890..


*lines from the film, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee  [from the book by Dee Brown]