The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - iii

from Edward Curtis

Hunger became a way of life throughout Native America in the 19th century. The reservation system created all kinds of opportunities for graft, for heartless white folks to simply disregard specified treaty conditions when it became not only possible but simple to line their own pockets with goods intended for the Indigenous. Government agents were notorious for their graft. The good ones were so few that they seemed heroes to people who depended upon them for the trials required in the Dakota Territory.

Meat and flour and coffee and all kinds of provisions had to be purchased somewhere by someone. Who will protect the rights of faraway tribes of “heathen savages,” when buying the cattle required by treaty to be sent west? Who will advocate for Indians when those cattle are slaughtered? —who will be sure the meat intended for Native people isn’t simply what the slaughterhouse knows no self-respecting white people would eat? Who will make contractually sure that the delivery gets to the reservation before the meat is spoiled? Who among the whites really care to do any of those jobs? Who really cares about those people anyway? They're barely human.

And why, out there in the middle of miles and miles of empty prairie, empowered by all kinds of goods flowing into the reservation, wouldn’t some crafty agent simply build bigger barns and warehouses to create his own businesses, his own means by which to dispatch the goods when no one is watching?

The reservation system created opportunities for graft that many adventurers, many criminals, simply determined were theirs for the taking. And the result among Native people was hunger, dissipation, disease, and suffering. The result was Big Foot moving slowly south with his people in December of 1890, all the way from Cheyenne River to Pine Ridge, and Wounded Knee.

Big Foot and his people were out there in territory off their reservation in large part because they were desperately hungry and needy. They had nothing. Red Cloud wanted Big Foot to help him deal with his problems, and Big Foot wanted Red Cloud to help him determine how to deal with white people.

But why were they under arrest at Wounded Knee? How did they come to be camped beneath the eyes of the Seventh Cavalry, in the sights of the Hotchkiss guns Lakota people had long before called “the guns that shoot at night and kill in the morning.” Were Big Foot and Red Cloud planning to mount an insurrection against a force of U.S. military that had swelled to become the largest single group of U. S. military assembled anywhere since the Civil War?

Very unlikely. Red Cloud, who some say is the only Lakota chief to win a war against white intruders, had signed on to a peace treaty and already seemed determined to no longer go to war. Big Foot, who was himself dangerously ill with pneumonia, was never known as a warrior but a peace-maker.

Ever since June of 1876, when General George Armstrong Custer had led a fighting force into battle at the Little Big Horn, Washington worked ferociously at restraining the Lakota, at keeping them on their respective reservations.

The obvious motivation was control. If the Lakota people--and the other First Nations bands--could be kept in one place, the opportunity to manage them would be greater than it would be if they were allowed to continue their nomadic way of life. Even though much of the land was being colonized by white folks, so much open land existed in the northern Great Plains that keeping track of the indigenous was impossible when they left the confines of the reservation.

Which is exactly what Big Foot had done. When he did, he and his people walked directly into a characterization that allowed them to be seen as law-breakers. Because they left Cheyenne River, they were considered “hostiles,” law-breakers.

Even though it would be thirty years until Marcella LeBeau was born, this whole story—and so much more—plays a role in the life of Marcella LeBeau, and the history which gives that life meaning and character.