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the Indians can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or
be crushed by it. The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism
destroyed, and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted.”
The Wounded Knee Massacre is still commonly depicted as a “battle”
that no one can be blamed for, but if blame is assigned it is always made
clear that a Lakota fired the first shot. This is the justification for all that
followed. A century after the murders, Congress issued an apology,
expressing “deep regret” for the events on that day in 1890 when upwards
of 370 men, women, and children were gunned down as they fled for their
lives. But the Wounded Knee Massacre was not an anomaly, nor was it an
accident. Wounded Knee is the entire history of indigenous peoples
relationship with Imperialism made manifest in a single event.
“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now
from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and
children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as
when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else
died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s
dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.” Black Elk.
The ancestors of the victims commemorate the massacre in order to
honor those who have fallen and to foster healing of their still devastated
communities. The ancestors of the perpetrators ignore inflicting the wound
and the wound festers.
From Wounded Knee, where just days after the massacre a young
newspaper editor named Frank Baum (later to become famous for the
children’s story “The Wizard of Oz”) opined, “The Pioneer has before
declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the
Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to
protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these
untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.“
To Vietnam, where Lyndon Johnson’s call to win hearts and minds of
the civilian population was corrupted by GI’s to, “When you have them by
the balls their hearts and minds will follow.”