The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - vii

That night, a snow storm came in on the wind and laid a gossamer veil over the carnage—some say mercifully; some think the hand of white man’s God was simply covering their sin.

What occurred that day at Wounded Knee was the final military action in the Plains Indians Wars, the horrid, bloody conclusion of a cultural and religious confrontation that sometimes looks even today like something obscenely inevitable. Millions of white people went west for cheap land they assumed Native tribes didn’t value. If Indians cared, where were the improvements, the tree lines, the fences, the frame buildings, the cut sod, where were the plows needed to open the soil? Millions of white people thought a holy book was a more than generous gift for the millions of acres the people had once roamed in freedom. White folks wanted to own what Native folks wanted to honor.

The Lakota people lost far more than those buried on the hill above the Wounded Knee. They lost what the cavalry and the government called “the battle”; they lost a way of life. “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard,” Black Elk says. “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

When the snowstorm came to the valley of the Wounded Knee a day later, the warm winter finally changed it face, and for the first time that winter snow covered the ground where dozens of Big Foot’s people—and Big Foot himself—froze into grotesque forms. Photographers followed the burial details so we have, like it or not, horrifying photographic records that display the way white men—some cavalry, some not—simply dumped frozen bodies into a mass grave at the top of the knoll overlooking the spot where the dying began. You can visit there today. Many do. Those who understand don’t leave in any way close to how they came.

Some believe the death of Crazy Horse, a year after Little Big Horn, a death not unlike the death of Sitting Bull, was the event that ripped the spirit from the Lakota people. If that’s true, then the massacre at Wounded Knee starkly compounded their dejected sadness. The photographs that remain of the Massacre at Wounded Knee are unforgettable, frozen bodies in tortured positions lie tangled in an open-pit grave. But those bodies are symbols too; their suffering and their dying is the legacy of a people decimated by the force of alien invaders whose “manifest destiny” could suffer no compromise. The distended frozen limbs belong to human beings destroyed on a battlefield but are also a portrait of a culture bereft its rituals and joys, its passions outlawed and finally almost destroyed.

The horror of the massacre at Wounded Knee cannot be imagined. To say anything more seems almost heartless when silence is the only vital response to a dark summary of what happened that late December day. But when, hours after it had begun, the slaughter finally went silent, pillagers, cavalry as well as white men from the region, went mad, ripping Ghost Dance shirts and dresses from the bodies of the dead, the sacred trappings of the people’s worship.

Souvenirs. Keepsakes. Mementos. If the shirts were blood-stained, so much the better, so much more silver those shirts and dresses might bring when traded at Yankton or Denver or wherever those “souvenirs” could be most peddled for cash.