This of course has to be addressed and this item is certainly a fair start. Afterv saying all that it is also true that a non Indian or a non Scot for that matter always begin from a natural position of dismissal when it comes to understanding an alien culture. We all have to and that includes even indigenous peoples as well, go forward without arrogance and real respect and a willingness to learn if we interact.
Today's blessing is that we are all communicating through a common language and it becomes possible to recover local knowledge. And make no mistake here, all indigenous knowledge is terribly local. It is also terribly valuable as our communal civilization now moves forward and puts the evils of the past behind us while also becoming much more integrated locally.
The good news is that the locals are now working at recovering that knowledge for all humanity. Anti Indianism will naturally disappear as we all once more become reattached to the land itself.
The Continuing Saga of Anti-Indianism in America: Critique of a Bestseller and the Reviewers Who Praise It
I
don't mean for this to be a book review of The
Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An
American Legend.
Rather,
I intend it to be an indictment of the genre of anti-Indianism(1) it
represents. Although it is unlikely that its authors consciously set
out to try and prove Western civilization's superiority over the
"barbarous Indians," they nonetheless follow in the
footsteps of those who have tried to do so
- The Invented Indian
- Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony
- Lawrence H. Keeley's War Before Civilization that proposes that civilization and centralized governments have overcome the horrors of primitive life (1997);
- Robert Whelan's Wild in the Woods: The Myth of the Peaceful Eco-Savage (1999) that offers such assertions as "Indigenous peoples have little to teach us about caring for the environment;"
- Shepard Krech's, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, who asserts that the demise of the buffalo was the fault of the Indians themselves (2000);
- Steven A. Lablank's Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Nobel Savagethat concludes that technology and science have put mankind on the right trajectory for world peace in comparison to the barbaric behaviors of aboriginal people (2003);
- Steven Pinker's text, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) who uses exaggerated and erroneous stories about Indigenous violence against European colonists to make the case that we are better off now than in pre-state societies.
- "Now dazzling Sioux war parties riding painted mounts rapidly and overwhelmingly extended their savage and relentless subjugation of neighboring tribes" (p. 56).
- "His dictated account almost certainly smoothed the sharp edges of this savage youth" (p.63).
- "Captain North wanted one more crack at the savages" (p.326).
- "The captain ordered a volley fired at the impertinent savages" (p. 328).
In
fact, the negative impact of The
Heart of Everything may
be worse than these blatantly anti-Indian publications. The latter at
least met with numerous scholarly and lay rebuttals. Not so with
Drury and Clavin's text. The high praise given it by such prestigious
and progressive publications as Salon and the Boston Globe refer to
the book's "exceptional fairness and accuracy."
Of
the many customer reviews at amazon.com, only a few offer a
single-star rating and express intelligent concern for problems such
as those I describe below. I did, however, find one critical review
by Tim Giago that is worth noting.
Giago,
also known as Nanwica
Kciji (Stands
Up for Them), is an Oglala, Lakota, as was Red Cloud. Born on the
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1934, he was a Nieman Fellow at
Harvard University; founded the first independently-owned American
Indian newspaper, now known as Indian Country Today; founded the
Native American Journalists Association; and is a columnist for the
Huffington Post, where he posted a short editorial on January 19,
2014, that challenged reviewer consensus that "honest treatment"
was given to the new book's history of Red Cloud and his people. He
accuses the authors of "misguided interpretations" and says
they "denigrate
while patting the
American Indian (2) on
the back."
It
is true that Drury and Clavin sometimes praise Indian prowess in
battle and occasionally criticize the treaty-breaking policies of the
US government and some misguided actions of its military. This gives
the impression of fairness and accuracy in spite of their absence. As
with hypnotic suggestions, the subtle ones have greater power than
the more obvious directives. Ultimately, the book's best-selling
status reflects the success of what contemporary Lakotas refer to as
the "Dances with Wolves" approach to the continued
demeaning of Native Peoples, an approach that prioritizes
Euro-centric people and values and ignores or dismisses the present
by romanticizing or distorting the past. To do so, the authors have
missed the mark on more things in one book than in any single
anti-Indian text I have seen, save perhaps the entire series
of Little
House on the Prairie,
now known as an exemplar in anti-Indian history (Wilder, 2006), with
mistakes about social structure, role of women, inherent values,
war-based cultures, individualism, art, the Sun Dance, the Black
Hills, spiritual beliefs, health and hygiene and more.
As
a Cherokee/Irish mixed blood and an Oglala relative and pipe carrier
who has fulfilled his Sun Dance vows with Rick Two Dog's Medicine
Horse group, I have a degree of passion about this topic. I dedicated
many years to critically researching and writing about the
"Indigenous worldview" that ties together the great variety
of Indigenous cultures. As a university professor, activist and
author/editor of a number of relevant publications, I feel a sense of
urgency about exposing anti-Indianism so as to encourage more people
to awaken to the perspectives about life that guided human behaviors
for most of our history, before "God moved indoors," to
quote my old friend, Sam Keen (1994, p.iv).
With
gratitude, I can say that I am not alone in this mission. In addition
to the many brothers and sisters struggling to help their people and
tell the world the truth about living in accord with the laws of
nature, many non-Indian thinkers are realizing that we can no longer
afford to dismiss, denigrate or ridicule the history or wisdom of
traditional Indigenous ways of knowing and relating to the world.
Noam Chomsky is but one example:
The grim prognosis for life on this planet is the consequence of a few centuries of forgetting what traditional societies knew, and the surviving ones still recognize. We must nurture and preserve our common possession, the traditional commons, for future generations, and this must be one of our highest values, or we are all doomed. To regain this sensibility from those who have preserved it we must pay careful attention to their understanding and practices (Chomsky, 2013, back-cover).
Thus,
my goal is not only to expose and rebuff some of the misguided and
inaccurate material in the targeted text, but also to show how we
must all be more mindful about assumptions that are rooted in the
hegemonic education and media in which most of us are immersed. Only
then might we turn the tide toward a more truthful understanding of
the traditional American Indian knowingness (3) that
Chomsky rightly says we all must start heeding, not as romantic
fantasies, but as practical solutions for a seriously at-risk future
facing all of us.
It
would take a book-length treatise to properly counter the many
off-putting claims and implications in The
Heart of Everything That Is.
I select a sampling of them here and offer only a cursory rebuttal,
hoping the reader will research those topics further that pique their
interest. A good place to start, although less significant perhaps
than what follows, is with the book's title and subtitle, starting
with the subtitle, "The Untold Story of Red Cloud."
The
Subtitle
It
is not an untold story at all. The bibliography of articles, chapters
and books about Red Cloud and his war against the whites would
require many pages to present. George E. Hyde's Red
Cloud's Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians (1937)
and James C. Olson's, Red
Cloud and the Sioux Problem (1965)
and Robert W. Larson's biography, Red
Cloud: Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux are
some of the well-known publications.
As
for as the publisher's claim that the authors draw on a long-lost
autobiography written near the end of Red Cloud's life, this refers
to a text easily accessible on amazon.com and given little
credibility by scholars. It is The
Autobiography of Red Cloud: War Leader of the Oglalas (1997)
and was compiled and edited by R. Eli Paul, who put together writings
from a third-hand clandestine interview of Red Cloud late in his life
whereby Charles Allen used Sam Deon, a conversation mate of Red
Cloud, to capture the man's personal story through a number of
meetings. Red Cloud, like many American Indians, "refused to be
written up, wanting no part of white man's money-making book scheme"
according to the editor's introductory notes (p. 25). Paul continues
to say that the document has some value, but should not be depended
upon for accuracy:
When one reads such ethnocentric words as "savages" (pages 32, 66 and 183); "aboriginal; (p. 108), "barbarous (p. 73 and 150); "fiends (p. 127) and "high priest" (p. 110), one is reading Charles Allen and the intrusive editors, not the spoke(n) words of Red Cloud. The narrative will never stand as the last word nor significantly illuminate the events of 'Red Cloud's War.' The history of the great man's personal narrative, the document itself, is a detective tale. It involves a healthy dose of deception, bad luck, bad faith and erroneous judgments by scholars, which through years transformed its importance as an historical reference into a minor literary curiosity.
Little
wonder that Drury and Clavin use words like "barbarous,"
"and "savage" throughout their book. "Savage"
is used at least 10 times in sentences such as:
- "Now dazzling Sioux war parties riding painted mounts rapidly and overwhelmingly extended their savage and relentless subjugation of neighboring tribes" (p. 56).
- "His dictated account almost certainly smoothed the sharp edges of this savage youth" (p.63).
- "Captain North wanted one more crack at the savages" (p.326).
- "The captain ordered a volley fired at the impertinent savages" (p. 328).
And
where the words are not used, similar ideas are nonetheless conveyed,
as in " "For all their historic ruthlessness, the tribes
had always lacked long-range planning . . . " (p.6) Or that
their "untold story" continues a tradition of "deception"
and "erroneous judgments" of too many antecedent stories.
The
Main Title
The
main title of the book, The
Heart of Everything That Is,
comes from the spiritual beliefs of the Lakota that the Black Hills
(Paha Sapa) of South Dakota are associated with their origins as a
People, particularly Pe' Sla, or Harney Peak, near the center of the
Black Hills. (4)
It
is the place where Lakota star-knowledge, such as those relating to
stories about Morning Star and the Pleiades, originated and has been
handed down from longer ago than anyone can remember. It is literally
and metaphorically at the heart of Lakota cosmology (Sundstrom, 1996,
p. 177). Many sacred ceremonies originated and continue to be
conducted in this sacred place. The Lakota have always conducted them
and continue to do so in order to sustain both their community and
humanity and other relations at large. They are done in accordance
with times dictated by constellations and the growing cycles that are
specific to the Black Hills region (Iron
Eyes,
2012).
Thus,
Paha Sapa is a critical source of Lakota identity, yet the authors
refer to it only three times with any significance, in spite of an
entire chapter titled "Paha Sapa." Moreover, all three
references tend to disparage the Lakota beliefs, whether intended or
not. In one place, the authors essentially dismiss the Lakota origin
story beliefs as either superstition or strategic fabrications by
referring to a conversation Red Cloud had with President Grant. Red
Cloud attempts to explain the mystical connection his people had with
Paha Sapa. Grant replies, "Horseshit," and proceeds to say
the Lakota only lived in the area for several generations and that
the Lakota stole the land from the Crow (p.50). The authors offer no
substantial counterpoints.
In
another, near the end of the text, they refer to the 1868 treaty
where the Black Hills were given back to the Lakota in a treaty that
only lasted a year:
In the center of this tract, like a glittering jewel, lay the Black Hills. Paha Sapa.The Heart of Everything That Is. It was the proudest moment of Red Cloud's life. That sentiment lasted a mere twelve months. For the Lakota were not finished dying. (italics mine)
And
in a third place, the authors, who at least admit that no one will
ever know for certain "who was the first Sioux to 'discover'"
the Black Hills," refer to an image of a pine tree on an Oglala
Winter Count of 1775-1776, and the interpretation of an Army colonel
named Garrick Mallery who owned it, as evidence for saying the Lakota
were only in the Black Hills after 1775, "the summer before
America's Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence"
(p. 345). Yet the authors could have referenced one of their cited
resources to tell the reader that "There are good reasons to
doubt Mallery's interpretation." For one, the tree symbols
involved more likely meant the Lakota had run out of cedar for
ceremonies and returned to the Black Hills on that date to get more,
not that they were discovering the place for the first time.
The
very mobile Lakotas lived within four hundred miles of the Black
Hills in the 16th century. The authors might also have said that
many of their names for the months relate to growth cycles of plants
found only in the Black Hills. Or that 13,000 year-old petroglyphs
and pictographs represent a number of important symbols of Lakota
spirituality, such as the Wakinyan or Thunder Bird, which have been
found in the Black Hills. They might have referenced how the seven
sacred ceremonies of the Lakota are aligned with specific places in
the Black Hills. "Of the seven Sacred Sites, honored by our
ancestors, only the four named above are known at this time. We have
a general idea of where the other three sacred sites are located, but
we are not exactly certain (Kills
Straight,
2004).
All
of this offers some credibility to the oral histories of the Lakota
and other tribes about their origins being associated with this
place. The authors might at least have had a footnote about the
current and quite famous contemporary legal battle over the Black
Hills, the United Nations' recommendations to give them back to the
Lakota, and the Lakota's refusal to accept monies for the land.
Their
Assertion that the Lakota Are a Patriarchal Society
This
may be one of the most egregious single assertions in the book. Early
on in their writing, after some gruesome descriptions about the
savagery of Indian men, the authors assert that the Lakota were/are a
patriarchal society:
Theirs was a patriarchal society with tribal affiliation passed from father to son, a simple solution for men fathering children with multiple wives from different bands. Leaders - called "Head Men" and "Big Bellies"- were for the most part chosen on merit. In some cases a chief would create an inside track for his favorite son, but even then the inheritor would have to earn the band's loyalty . . . (p.37).
Actually,
the Lakota are, and always have been, matrilineal. A large body of
legitimate evidence exists in support of this, both from the Lakota
themselves and from a number of credible folks documenting it over
the past 200 years. Simply put, American Indian women had
significantly more authority and autonomy than European women
(Megalopensis,
1898, Bilharz,
1995).
Women
controlled most of the tribe's resources. When men married, they
lived with the wife's relatives. Women elders were highly respected
and adult women had equal power in decision-making. The children
belong to the mother's clan. Today, in spite of the loss of language
and culture and in spite of hundreds of years of anti-matrilineal
propaganda, the Lakota women
are still the backbone of the Lakota nation. (Interestingly, the
13,000 year-old cave paintings make many connections between the
feminine and the buffalo, perhaps revealing how both give
sustenance.)
How
could such seasoned journalists miss the wealth of substantiation for
the Lakota being matriarchal? Perhaps it was to justify or make
congruent their claims that the "Sioux" men badly treated
their woman who, according to the authors, were "closer to
slaves than second-class citizens by modern standards of thinking"
(p.65). If so, this would not be the first time that European
chroniclers did not want to acknowledge the freedom and power of
native women, as Dr. Barbara Mann describes inUnlearning
the Language of Conquest.
In her chapter, "Where are Your Women: Missing in Action,"
Mann, a Seneca woman and highly respected expert on the Iroquois
Confederacy, writes:
This remains a good question for Western commentators, popular and scholarly alike. Women are missing-in-action in nearly all studies of Native America, whether historical, social or anthropological. I believe this is because westerners are still reacting to the panic that European patriarchs felt upon discovering Turtle Island chock-full of self-directed, articulate, and confident Native women, all demanding to be dealt with as equals. The initial Euro-male horror was frank and obvious in first-contact records and the recoil remains, skewing discussion (p. 121).
Mann
continues to talk about how 18th and 19th century
historians dedicated themselves to disregarding the strict
matriarchal Indian societies in support of European patriarchal
mandates.
Such revelations were pills too bitter for Western men to swallow- so they fixed up the record. . . . Ohio Natives have traditionally called this tactic "pen-and-ink witchcraft," that is, making the written record (which westerners promotes as the only record) say something completely different from what the living record said at the time and what oral traditions said afterward . . . The consequence of two centuries' worth of sustained pen-and-ink witchcraft is a phonied-up picture of Native America, pared down to faceless male "warriors" (the actual term is "young men") and a handful of visionary statesmen (p. 124 and 129).
Out-of-Context
Emphasis on Warfare1
The
connection between promoting patriarchy and dismissing the true role
of women in American Indian societies is closely connected to the
glorification and rationalization of war. If indeed Drury and Clavin
really are continuing the tradition of Western hegemony's "pen
and ink witchcraft," one might argue that their apparent
interest in war heroism and strategy might play a role in their
anti-Indian prose. By exaggerating or taking out of context the
warfare orientation of the Lakota and other tribes they mention, they
support the contention that war is a natural part of humanity. At the
same time, by applauding the Indian's warrior traits while also
picturing them as dirty, blood-thirsty, women-dominating savages,
they show that this part of human nature, i.e. being war-oriented,
proves that it is a good thing modern civilization took over. Such an
intricate motivation for anti-Indianism is well established and often
encourages a sense of nationalistic righteousness about American war
efforts throughout history.
I
cannot judge the authors' intention for having fallen into this role
of hegemonic gatekeeping, and it may be unfair of me to criticize a
book intended to be about the history of a particular war for being
too supportive of the concept of war. However, one must consider
whether how and why they wrote the Red Cloud book is somehow related
to their other books glorifying war and the American military, such
as Last
Men Out: The True Story of America's Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam,
and The
Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat,
the latter which was awarded the Marine Corps Heritage
Foundation's General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award for
nonfiction. I also think it is significant to note how they end this
book, for how an author ends a book says much about their
point-of-view. Their last paragraph seems to be saying exactly what I
have alleged - that the development of Western civilization was a
sufficient motive for Indian genocidal policies:
If Red Cloud could read he might have comprehended the motives of the whites. Although it is still doubtful that he would have understood. Years later, William H. Bisbee attempted to come to grips with an overriding rhetorical question of that bygone era - "for what purpose did the United States fight Red Cloud?"
"My only answer could be," General Bisbee wrote, "we did it for civilization" (p.365).
Indeed,
this last sentence seems to summarize the entire book. From its
beginning, the authors paint an ugly picture of the "uncivilized"
warlike personalities of the Lakota:
Captured whites were scalped, skinned, and roasted alive over their own campfires, shrieking in agony as Indians yelped and danced about them like the bloody-eyed Achilles celebrating over the fallen Hector. Men's penises were hacked off and shoved down their throats and women were flogged with deer-hide quirts while being gang-raped. Afterward their breasts, vaginas, and even pregnant wombs were sliced away and laid out on the buffalo grass. Carrington's patrols rode often to the rescue, but almost always too late, finding victims whose eyeballs had been gouged out and left perched on rocks, or the burned carcasses of men and women bound together by their own steaming entrails ripped from their insides while they were still conscious (p.9).
And,
The first French explorers to make contact with the Sioux in the mid-1600s noted with not a little horror the tribe's fierce and utter barbarism. The Europeans had long since adapted and reconciled themselves to the New World's Stone Age cultures. But the Sioux's vicious raids on their Algonquin neighbors to the north and east - and the sheer joy they took in tearing their enemies limb from limb with rocks, clubs, sharpened sticks and flint knives were more than they bargained for (p.35).
I
grant that the authors offer a similar description of the American
soldiers, albeit in significantly fewer places in the book and with a
sense that American atrocities are temporary insanities, often
provoked, in contrast to the permanent state accorded the Indians'
violent proclivities. For example, in their treatment of a particular
famous series of battles, they write "After the soldier's bodies
were stripped of uniforms, boots, guns and ammunition, the customary
orgy of atrocities ensued. Scalps were collected and limbs hacked
away. Some of the bodies were flayed and skinned, others rolled into
a roaring bonfire" (p. 128). Note that while the Indian
atrocities are "customary," even relished, the atrocities
committed by the soldiers are described as full of revenge relating
to a previous battle, as if the Indians had not suffered more than a
hundred years of genocide by this point in time in the late 1800s.
The authors go even further by excusing American initiated war
atrocities in general:
It is not difficult to imagine the soldiers' shooting spree as the visceral response of resentful, ill-disciplined, and possibly drunken troops isolated in hostile territory. Personal revenge has occurred in armies throughout history and these overreactions foreshadowed American atrocities at San Creek, at Biscari, at My Lai, at Abu Ghraib. More over, the few officers stationed at Fort Laramie were young and inexperienced, unable to control their enlisted men, most of whom considered the Indians subhuman. The instigator of the killings was not even a soldier, but a hard-drinking half-blood interpreter . . . (p.134).
Johan
M.G. van der Dennen explains the general phenomenon in his doctoral
dissertation and subsequent 900 page-book, The
Origin of War: The Evolution of a Male-Coalitional Reproductive
Strategy:
Peaceable preindustrial (preliterate, primitive, etc.) societies constitute a nuisance to most theories of warfare and they are, with few exceptions, either denied or "explained away." In this contribution I shall argue that the claim of universal human belligerence is grossly exaggerated; and that those students who have been developing theories of war, proceeding from the premise that peace is the "normal" situation, have not been starry-eyed utopians" (1995, p.2).
A
section from a course on Arizona Indians taught at Northern Arizona
University supports this premise that peace was the normal situation
even for the Apaches, shown in not only our subject book on Red
Cloud, but in many media depictions, as brutally warlike:
It is important to remember that before contact with the Spanish, the Apache were a relatively peaceful people. After this contact they acquired horses and began raiding both Spanish settlements and pueblos. The purpose of these raids was NOT to kill people, but to avoid contact while gaining wealth and honor through stealing of horses, cattle, and other goods. In the traditional Apache home, women were the anchors of the family. The residence was matrilocal, with high respect for the elderly. Honesty was valued above other qualities. The traditional Apache were primarily hunters and gatherers, and traditional arts included fine basketry.
Lakota
Worldview and Values
In
referring to the violent, warlike dispositions of the Apache, the
Lakota and other tribes in their Red Cloud book, Drury and Slavin had
a number of opportunities to describe the deeply held values of the
Indians that would have shown how the violence was a forced diversion
from their most cherished ways of being in the world, ways that
caused many European invaders in the early days of conquest to desert
in order to live with the Indians. Such worldview philosophies are
mentioned but one time in The
Heart of Everything That Is and
only as a device to introduce more insulting "history." In
Chapter Nine, they tell a story purporting to show that Red Cloud's
desire to "erase the memory of his alcoholic Brule father"
(p. 106) and marry into the right family in order to enhance his
political power and leadership. The story includes the suicide of a
girl Red Cloud - jilted for this cause - who truly loved him. In the
opening pages, the authors write:
The four pillars of a Sioux leader - acknowledged by the tribe to this day - are bravery, fortitude, generosity and wisdom. Time and again Red Cloud exhibited each. Yet, traditionally, the Lakota also considered lessor factors when weighing the attributes of an aspiring Head Man (p. 108).
The
authors go on to describe these lesser factors that relate to Red
Cloud's ambitions to climb the ladder to the top at all costs, a goal
completely foreign to traditional Lakota values. Please do not get me
wrong. All humans are potentially subject to the same weaknesses of
character. Certainly many Lakota and other First Nations Peoples
today have left behind cultural values that emphasize relatedness to
all, generosity, honesty, humility, courage, etc., as a result of
constant oppression, historical trauma (Aytes (2013), loss of
identity, alcoholism and hegemonic education (Four Arrows, 2013). The
stressors facing Indians in the 1800s no doubt created similar
departures from the chanku luta, the red road.
Whether
or not the given history in this chapter about Red Cloud is true, we
can never know, but it is possible. Yet in this one paragraph, the
authors essentially dismiss the entire Lakota nation's true and
historically verified way of life philosophy. First, the four values
they mention, which can be found on numerous websites, are Lakota
values, not just expected traits of a military leader. But if this is
not bad enough, the authors refer to the values only as a lever to
emphasize such attributes as self-centeredness, jealousy, betrayal,
and unfettered ambition that disregard all values.
Every
culture has such values as relate to universal virtues such as
courage, generosity and fortitude. And who does not treasure wisdom?
What is missing from the Red Cloud story through and through is a
sense of worldview differences between the Euro-Americans and the
Indians. Instead, the entire book is written as if the dominant
worldview of the authors rightfully applies to the Indians. This is,
of course neither new nor surprising, but it must be recognized for
what it is.
If
the authors truly wanted to share a sense of the Lakota values, they
might have better described the ways the People understood bravery
(courage), wisdom, fortitude and generosity in very different ways
than these concepts are understood in mainstream thinking. I have
written about this elsewhere (Jacobs and Jacobs-Spencer, 2008, and
Jacobs, 1998) and prefer to close this subject by simply offering one
of the many other iterations of Lakota life philosophy, one that
might lead to a deeper, more valid understanding of the culture, then
and now.
I
submit that an authentic history of the Lakota shows that, although
the pre-contact Lakota, like most other tribes, varied in their
particular inclinations as relates to violence, whether relating to
raids to capture wives, display courage, or settle disputes, and that
although having words to define one's social goals can have little to
do with actualization, the Lakota "walked their talk" and
many still do in ways that are not brought to life in The
Heart of Everything That Is and
its story about Red Cloud, his People and Allies. Perhaps the next
time someone reads the authors' claim that "warfare among
Indians was simply a way of life (p.40), there will be some critical
hesitation and an effort to do some Internet research to see if this
is true. I recommend starting with Yale
University's
Human Resource Area Files orpeacefulsocieties.org.
Other
Problems
It
would take too many more pages to properly address a number of other
inaccuracies and anti-Indian assertions and implications, however,
closing with a brief introduction of some of them will help readers
understand the pervasiveness of the kinds of misunderstandings and
false assumptions that have plagued our Native neighbors for
centuries and have prevented their wisdom from hundreds of thousands
of years surviving and thriving in the Americas. Below, I identify
the authors' apparent belief or assertion and follow it with a brief
counter-argument. My responses are far from adequate, but with a
little time and reasonable discretion about sources, the reader can
use the Internet to easily find ample counter-positions.
• "Disease
and alcohol would kill more Plains Indians than all the battles with
the whites combined." (p. 40)
Early
on in the book, the authors set the stage to minimize the reader's
concern that the Americans are going to be the villain in this story.
The word "genocide" is not mentioned once in the text in
spite of its relevance to "Red Cloud's War." There is no
doubt that diseases like small-pox killed many Indians, and there are
researched opinions, albeit controversial, that sometimes that was
intentional, as when Indians were given small-pox laden blankets.
However, the accuracy of this claim is highly suspect. For example,
Russell Thornton's text, American
Indian Holocaust and Survival (1990),
shows the Indian Wars caused a significant portion of the
"extermination" of American Indians by 1890.
William
Osborn's book: The
Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from
Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee (2000)
shows that the forced marches alone killed a large number of people.
For example, he estimates that 4,000 of 14,000 Cherokees died on the
Trail of Tears. He explains that such statistics were not officially
included as battle deaths or part of any "atrocities."
There were also large numbers of Indians who starved to death as a
result of the destruction of wildlife such as the buffalo. Do Drury
and Clavin not see this a strategy of war?
In
2009, Dr. Mary Hamer, M.D., wrote in the December issue of
Countercurrents an apology for the decimation of the American Indians
I share to close this brief rebuttal:
This essay is about the intent to kill with premeditation, reckless endangerment with depraved indifference, cruelty & other harms committed by Columbus, the European settlers & descendants, the American & European governments, Christian churches, etc. to the Native American people. This paper is about 1st degree murder with malice aforethought as well as manslaughter & criminal negligence with reckless disregard for human life. Furthermore, these crimes against the Native American Indians did not stop with our forefathers; These crimes by the dominant society continue to the present day, including neglect & deprivation.
• "Given
their diet, lifestyle, and, at best, casual hygiene, most adult
Indians had teeth like a crazy fence" (p.56).
This
is literally another page taken out of the propaganda literature of
the 19th century. The scholarship challenging this
assertion is significant. For example, Herman Viola and Carolyn
Margolis, authors of the book Seeds
of Change: The Story of Cultural Exchange after 1492 write,
"Another factor that promoted lower rates of disease was an
emphasis on personal hygiene and sanitation." Vogel writes in
his book, American
Indian Medicine,
"Contrary to the assumptions of many whites, aboriginal Indians
were a clean people and had a much higher regard for bathing than was
common among their white neighbors" (1979, p.45).
In
their article on personal hygiene and American Indians, Keoke and
Porterfield support this claim as does Ohio State University
Professor Richard Steckel, whose co-authored study, "Standing
Tall: Plains Indians Enjoyed Height, Health Advantage," reviewed
data from 1,123 Indians from eight equestrian Plains tribes,
including the Lakota, that "despite the many technological
advantages that the European-American settlers had over the American
Indians, the Plains tribes enjoyed better health" (2001). The
Lakota, like many tribes, believed that bathing was a form of
spiritual purification and the initi, or house of vapor (aka
"sweat-lodge), was one of their most sacred ceremonies. Indians
of the northern plains "bathed on a daily basis, even in winter"
(IBID, p.11) (5)
Your
Turn
I
leave these 10 quotes to you. If you wish, it is your turn to
challenge the rest of the inaccuracies in the book I've quoted below.
If your curiosity and time available does prompt you to use solid
Internet research to question and answer some of these, I recommend
you do so with a careful eye for the source's credibility and not use
the "expert" Drury and Clavin admit to using for their
book! They write, "Robert Utley, reviewed a draft of this
manuscript for omissions and any errors in both judgment and fact"
(p. 367). Allow me, since I've started on this, to make Utley my last
critique.
Robert
M. Utley, born in 1929, was the chief historian for the National Park
Service and a historian of the old west, with special interest in
military histories, as per Drury and Clavin. In 1963, he authored The
Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963).
Like the 2014 Red Cloud book we have been discussing, it received
major accolades from the media. "A major job . . . magnificently
researched." - San Francisco Chronicle; "By far the best
treatment of the complex and controversial relationship between the
Sioux and their conquerors yet presented and should be must reading
for serious students of Western Americana." - St. Louis Post
Dispatch, etc.
In
a 1965 edition of American Anthropologist, John C. Ewers of the
Smithsonian Institute writes a book review of Utley's text. He
expresses somewhat critically that Utley was exceptionally
sympathetic with the American soldiers, perhaps an unpopular decision
in the Academy in the '60s. He points out that Utely felt the
massacre at Wounded Knee was merely an accident and that the soldiers
and American government should not be blamed. Ewers concludes,
"Certainly Utley's appraisal of this last significant battle
between Indians and Whites in the United States will not be popular
among those whose critical judgment of this tragic action tends to be
influenced by their sympathies" (p.1393).
I
offer this feedback with all due respect for Mr. Utely, whose work I
was unfamiliar with until now with some incredulity that Drury and
Clavin relied upon the expertise of an 85 year-old federal historian
whose work back in 1965 was criticized by a Smithsonian scholar as
being of a similar nature to the critiques I have levied in this
paper. One of my pet peeves with my doctoral students is when they
use outdated reference material for their citations without checking
its potential bias, unless of course, the views of the authors and
their "expert" were in harmony.
And
now, here are some other important misleading or fully inaccurate
quotes from the authors that I hope a number of you will challenge!
- "From literally the first day European emigrants set foot on the New World's fatal shores, whites and Indians had engaged in bloody, one-sided, constant battles" (p.6).
- "Tribes had always lacked long-range planning" (p. 150).
- "One could make the case that despite his people's deep political tradition of near fanatical individuality, he may have even acceded to the concept of a single Sioux "chief" most likely because it would have been himself" (p. 34).
- "Native American animal husbandry had lagged about four millennia behind the rest of the world" (p.36).
- "It was the hostile Chippewa who dubbed these peoples 'Sioux' or 'Little Snakes'" (p. 37).
- "Also, as other tribes took their first, tentative steps into modernity, this cultural leap seemed impossible for the hunter-gather Sioux. Had some of their historical contemporaries - the imperious Aztecs, the sophisticated Cherokee, the politically savvy Iroquois - been aware of their existence, they would probably have considered the Sioux laughable or subhuman" (p. 40).
- "Some historians argue that the Great Horse Dispersal actually stunted Sioux society by preventing the tribe's progression into the 'civilized' pursuit of agriculture, hierarchical organization, and social diversification." (p. 56).
- "Whites observed a tribe that hunted and grubbed for a living with flint arrows and stone tools and exhibited no artistic tendencies other than painting their bodies and faces with hideous designs in preparation for battle" (p.36).
- "The majority of tribes believed that all humans went to the same idyllic afterlife in the exact physical condition in which they died . . . a literal Happy Hunting Ground" (p. 56)
- "There were numerous self-torture and vision-fasting purification rites that Lakota fighting men undertook, but none was as notorious - or as fearsome and unfathomable to whites - as the annual Sun Dance: ceremony. Sioux braves (and, in a few rare cases, women) believed that only by subjecting the body to excruciating physical suffering could an individual release the spirit imprisoned in the flesh and come to understand the true meaning of life. It was the key, the Sioux believed, to gaining a physical edge, to avoid bad luck and illness, and to ensuring success during the hunt and in battle" (p. 77).
Footnotes:
1. See
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s book, Anti-Indianism
in Modern America (2001)
and Four Arrows’s edited text, Unlearning
the Language of Conquest: Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in
America for
more on this concept
2. As
does Tim, I also use the unfortunate word, “Indian,” to describe
the various tribal peoples referred to in the book. Words like
“Indian,” “Sioux,” “chief,” and many others have been
used for so long, the disrespect they might convey has become more a
matter of intent
3. I
readily admit that Indian people, whether full-blood or mixed,
whether living on reservations or not, are losing such knowingness,
along with the language that fosters it, under the continuing
oppression of colonization and loss of identity.
4. The
Lakota language is very descriptive, and the name comes from what the
Black Hills looks like from above, an area darkened by the colors and
shadows of the trees that populate it.
5. See
also: National Library of Medicine.United States 19th-Century
Doctors' Thoughts about Native
American Medicine.
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