May 31, 2011
It seemed as fitting to remember the monumental sacrifices of an entire people, the American Indian, as it did to remember war veterans and generations of my own family gone before, Memorial Day weekend. I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which surveys the decimation of the American Indian in the U.S. territories and states in the mid-19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It was a swift annihilation propelled by the feverish drive of Europeans to possess land, extract gold and other minerals, and in general, enjoy prosperity and freedom—at the cost of the lives of thousands upon thousands of people murdered or displaced, and of countless buffalo and horses massacred to deprive Indians of sustenance, passage, and lifeways. Why? to occupy, farm, mine, build roads and highways and cities, conquer, control, and use the continent for sustenance and success. It is a tragic and horrific history.
Dee Brown’s historical account of the movements and battles that eventually eroded the American Indian and animal population, based on narratives told and or written by people there as the events unfolded, was published in 1970. I was in high school in St. Peter, Minnesota, in 1970. I have taken a particular interest then and now in those parts of the book—for it is a long narrative of 500 pages and an epic account given in much detail—in those parts of the book that tell the story of the Dakota, or Sioux, Indians, because I grew up in this place where a part of the war between whites and Dakota took place.
For information regarding the annual Mankato area pow wow honoring the 38 Dakota executed in a mass hanging December 26, 1862, please follow this link: mahkatowacipi.org
It really was a war. There was an invasion and then, there was a fifty-year war, and those native people that white people didn’t murder or cause to die by disease and deprivation, were herded onto small patches of useless land. American Indian children survivors were placed in boarding schools for assimilation into white culture; however, systematic racism would prevent true integration. Their survival, and their preservation, to any extent, of their native language and culture, is proof of indomitable spirit and revival. The war to annihilate the American Indian consisted of fifty some years of military assaults using technology combined with confinement to inhospitable landscapes where they were subjected to hard conditions and deprivation, which exacerbated illness, disease, and debilitation due to injuries. The American Indian was confined, starved, and murdered, and white European people did this.
This is an almost impossible thing for me to reconcile. My ancestors arrived in Minnesota in 1874 and 1880, or thereabouts. My paternal grandmother’s parents came from Norway, and all the rest of my great grandparents came from a part of the German empire that is now in Poland. My ancestors were here, in Minnesota, during the events at Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. The Treaty of Traverse de Sioux of 1851, the Dakota War of 1862, the displacement of Indians to northwestern Nebraska and southern South Dakota, and the Treaty of 1868, which recognized the Black Hills as Indian territory, were effected before their immigrations. Of course, none of these treaties was honored; moreover, the series of military campaigns culminating in the murders of Sitting Bull, Big Foot, and another in a series of massacres of Indian people at Pine Ridge reservation, all took place in the two decades that followed, the 1870s and 1880s, with the Massacre at Wounded Knee occurring in December, 1890. My great grandparents had settled near St. Peter by this time. My paternal great grandparents were fairly newly here when the Sioux and Cheyenne defeated Gen. Custer at Little Bighorn in June, 1876. They were here during those years when Buffalo Bill Cody took his Wild West Show on the road, which for at least one tour featured Sitting Bull. They were here when the newspapers recounted events at Wounded Knee. At best, reading the newspaper or hearing the news, they felt sorrow and mourned the losses endured during war, and even then, they had already become part of the systematic removal of Indians from Indian land. I understand now a little better why writers of historical fiction imbue past events with new life and characters. It is a way of entering the past, evoking its ghosts, trying to understand, and recreating it. It is a way of resurrecting and honoring the dead.
