Wounded Knee

It was Ian Frazier’s Great Plains that taught me something about the Ghost Dance. I’d never heard of it before; but then, most white Americans haven’t.  The stories surrounding slavery are well-known to most, but the stories of Native America somehow escapes most palefaces like me.  In that book, Frazier tells great stories of the Plains Indians, who were, by and large, a fierce bunch, maybe the quintessential Native American—feathered headdress, breechcloth, body paint, spear and shield and bow and arrow, all of that regalia on a chiseled male mounted on a paint pony.

Frazier nearly deifies Crazy Horse, as many do.  Crazy Horse, a Lakota hero at Little Big Horn, was the battle leader who simply would not bow to the flood of white folks who, time after time, found all kinds of crooked ways to put the Lakota (Sioux) people off traditional lands.  In The Great Plains, Frazier creates a miscellany of 19^th century Native American life, including a description of what he calls the first truly American religion, the Ghost Dance.

The sources of this strange, Indian Great Awakening are multiple—a little Protestantism, a little Mormonism, a little Catholicism, all grafted to spiritual roots that are soundly Native American in character.

 

The Ghost Dance swept most tribes in the American west.  It was worship really, a ritual dance created to summon the old world back, the ancestors and the buffalo and the traditional way of life that had just about completely disappeared by 1890.  It was, I think, a vision of heaven to a starving, beaten people, robbed of heritage.  The Ghost Dance gave them a vision of what they wanted so badly to see, instead of the annihilation that was actually there.

Out here—or a couple hours west—the Lakota variation on the Ghost Dance included the mistaken belief that wearing a ghost shirt or dress meant the wearer could not be harmed by white man’s bullets.  And that belief, Ian Frazier claims, scared white people badly and played a significant role in what happened 121 years ago today on a broad and open expanse of indistinguishable prairie along a creek whose name is Wounded Knee.  You might say, that's how I came to Wounded Knee.

What started in 1862 with the Dakota War in Minnesota ended on December 29, 1890, when the largest military encampment in America since the Civil War got into a fight with 50 or so of Big Foot's Lakota braves.  Big Foot himself was suffering horribly with pneumonia after leading his people on an unthinkably long walk from the very top of what is now South Dakota, to the bottom—and in late December, remember.

What exactly happened to begin what became a massacre is disputed today, but the outcome is not.  There were sparks of anger aplenty, and one of them ignited a conflagration.  The Seventh Calvary (itself decimated at Little Big Horn and, some say, just aching for a fight) and others in that huge cavalry encampment simply gunned down Big Foot’s band—men, women, and children—often in cold  blood.

 

No one really knows how many Lakota died.  Estimates range as high as 300.  But what happened at Wounded Knee ended the Great Sioux Wars.  To say what happened out there in the middle of winter is a blot on American history is obscene understatement.  What happened there was evil, as all massacres are.
 

One of the dreams I’ve had for years is some kind of worship service on December 28 or 29, dates that mark two horrific massacres—King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents after Jesus’s birth, and the Wounded Knee Massacre.  Those two events are not analogous, but in both cases those who wielded great power simply butchered innocent human beings

Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, is in pure fly-over country.  It’s well off the beaten path, and a long ways from most anything that would attract a tourist.  If you want to go there, you have to want to go there.

And really, who would?--what white guy, at least?  It's a horrible story.

 

Maybe that’s why what happened there 121 years ago today is so invisible to millions of white Americans.  Maybe so.

 

And maybe not.  Maybe whites like me would rather not know, not remember.  Maybe we prefer politicians who say, unequivocally, they’ll never, ever apologize for America.

Maybe so.

Six or seven hours west of here, this morning, on December 29, 1890, 300 or more Lakota people were massacred.  That’s what happened.

But I think we can say this too: that right there, along a creek called Wounded Knee, 121 years ago, we were all there, every last one of us.