Wounded Knee Massacre Research Articles

Bridging Performances of Auto/ethnography and Queer Bodies of Color to Advocacy and Civic Engagement

On June 12th, 2016 in Orlando, Florida, 49 people were shot and murdered and 53 people were hospitalized in the deadliest shooting in the United States since the Wounded Knee Massacre. President Barack Obama called the event: “An act of terror and an act of hate.” The gunman attacked Pulse, a LGBTQAI nightclub, during Pride Month around 2 A.M. on “Latin Night” while approximately 320 people were dancing, finishing drinks, and preparing to head home.

Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory . By David Grua

Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory . By David Grua. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xi + 276 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.) David Grua sets out to demonstrate the significance of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre in American collective memory. He examines the tension between experience, official memory, and countermemory associated with the tragedy, when soldiers of the United States Seventh Cavalry killed over one hundred and fifty Lakota people. Scholars have long relied on the military records, transcripts of oral testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and contemporary newspaper articles connected with this confrontation to inform their work. Using the same material, Grua reveals the almost-unknown story of how the Lakota survivors campaigned for … jawinchester{at}fhsu.edu

Song of Dewey Beard: Last Survivor of the Little Bighorn. By Philip Burnham

Song of Dewey Beard: Last Survivor of the Little Bighorn . By Philip Burnham. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. xvii + 248 pp. Illustrations, maps, chart, notes, bibliography, index. $26.95, CAN$33.95, £17.99.) Dewey Beard was the last living Lakota warrior to participate in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Born when Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States, he died in his nineties during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. A nephew of Crazy Horse, he lived an event-filled life. He killed a soldier at Little Bighorn, then fled to Canada with Sitting Bull. Later, he lost his father, mother, two brothers, wife, and young son at the Wounded Knee Massacre, where he was wounded … Paul.beck{at}wlc.edu

Acting Out Assimilation: Playing Indian and Becoming American in the Federal Indian Boarding Schools

Acting Out AssimilationPlaying Indian and Becoming American in the Federal Indian Boarding Schools John R. Gram (bio) During the summer of 1886 the students of Albuquerque Indian School (ais) marked the passing of Decoration Day (predecessor of Memorial Day) with a day-long picnic. The following Monday the students took part in the Decoration Day parade in Albuquerque at the invitation of the local gar (Grand Army of the Republic) post. The boys wore their school uniforms and marched “in precision of movement and soldierly bearing,” while the girls, dressed in white aprons, rode on a float decorated with patriotic bunting. Each side of the float bore a banner with a different motto: “Anglo-Saxon civilization rules the world, we submit.” “Wise statesmanship demands a homogenous population.” “Patriotism precludes allegiance to civil powers, independent of the United States.” “We are free born; education confers knowledge and power to assert and maintain our freedom.”1 Scholars have long noted the assimilative importance of activities beyond classroom and industrial training at Indian boarding schools.2 What has received little focus in the existing literature, however, is the use of public performances, such as the Decoration Day parade described above—moments intended for consumption by both the student body and local citizens—as agents of assimilation. This study hopes to demonstrate the importance of public performance to the assimilative mission of the federal Indian boarding schools by examining how they were used at Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools from roughly 1880 to 1930. It also hopes to demonstrate that studying such performances at the boarding schools can place Indian education within the larger project of assimilation that preoccupied the country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the [End Page 251] larger struggle over how the American public was to understand Indians and themselves. Though likely with varying levels of awareness, the Indian students participating in this parade, the Albuquerque Indian School personnel who arranged their participation, the gar post that invited them, and the Albuquerque citizens who watched the child soldiers and float pass by were all engaged in several national conversations as they took part in their local parade that day. These conversations remained important ones in American society during the era stretching from roughly 1880 to 1930. The first conversation revolved around how late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Americans would think about Native Americans now that the conquest of the West was drawing to a close. The Wounded Knee Massacre, often thought of as the last battle of these wars, would happen a mere four years after this parade. One popular image of Native Americans was championed by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and other similar Wild West shows that enjoyed immense popularity during this time period. The appeal of these shows was the opportunity to witness an “authentic” display of a quickly closing chapter in the nation’s history. As historian L. G. Moses explains, “It appeared to many Americans . . . that the West and its native inhabitants, however wild they once may have been, were passing from existence.”3 In the words of another historian, Paul Reddin, the shows “tantaliz[ed] people with the proposition that they had missed something special because a particular phase of Plains history was nearing its end or had already passed.”4 These shows were about selling the past, not the future. And the Indians who worked in these shows were carefully crafted inhabitants of that past. They wore traditional costumes and performed traditional activities for audiences, which could include anything from building a teepee, to dancing, to “traditional” attacks on wagon trains. The message was clear: the era of such Indians was over. Fear and anxiety had been replaced by curiosity and nostalgia.5 The federal government during this same period, however, was firmly committed to the idea that Indians not only were part of the nation’s past but also must be made part of its future. One consequence of this competing “image” of Indians was government-operated boarding schools, which sprang up in significant numbers in the trans-Mississippi West in the late nineteenth century, representing the next step in a nearly four...

Legitimation, State Repression, and the Sioux Massacre at Wounded Knee

The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and the Ghost Dance movement that preceded it offer a compelling sociological case for understanding legitimation, elite framing, and repression. Building on the social movements literature and theoretical insights on power, institutions, and inequality, we engage in multimethod, in-depth analyses of a rich body of archived correspondence from key institutional actors at the time. Doing so contributes to the literature by drawing attention to (1) the cultural foundations of inequality and repression; (2) super-ordinate framing by political elites and the state; and (3) key institutional conflicts and their consequences. We find that, within an ambiguous colonial context, officials of the Office of Indian Affairs and federal politicians shelved benign military observations and, instead, amplified ethnocentric and threat frames. Force was consequently portrayed as justifiable, which increased the likelihood of the massacre. We conclude by discussing the utility of our results for conceptions of culture, power, inequality, the state, and state violence.

The Illustrated American and the Lakota Ghost Dance

The ceremonial dance contempo rary reporters dubbed the ghost dance has inspired shelves of books and hundreds of articles, both popular and scholarly. Called the spirit dance by the Lakota, it was part of a revivalist and millennialist move ment sweeping through Native American tribes in the West in the late 1880s and early 1890s. As such, it remains cemented in the coun try's collective consciousness by its association with the Wounded Knee Massacre on December 29, 1890, that inglorious symbol for both the end of the Indian wars and the failure of governmental and reformist policies. Exaggerated news accounts appearing in regional and national newspapers contributed to the hysteria resulting in the tragedy at Wounded Knee. Reporters variously described an uprising, an out break, and a war. It was none of these—except in the columns of the contemporary press, declared Elmo Watson, the first scholar to look more closely at the sensationalized coverage, with its lurid headlines, hyperbolic reporting, and sometimes invented news.1 Decades later, William S. E. Coleman, a Drake University professor of theatre arts, inserted excerpts from these news accounts into the running narra tive of his Voices of Wounded Knee (2000). More recently, Rani-Henrik Andersson, a Finnish specialist in North American studies, chronicled coverage by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tri bune, Harper's Weekly, the Omaha Daily Bee, and the Yankton Press and Dakotan in a chapter of his Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 (2008). However, scholars have yet to examine the images accompanying these accounts with the same scrutiny. Apart from Frederic Remington's art for Harper's Weekly (see Figure 1), few of these illustrations have been discussed at all, and those only in isolation. Lost, then, are the interpretive frames for these images. Today's readers, seeing the images divorced from their original layouts, lack a means to determine how individual newspapers defined or constructed the controversy across a series of issues or within a single number. Missing, too, are the correspondents' stated (or perhaps latent) agen das, which might inflect their readers' interpretations of the artwork. Out of context, the images lack indices of facticity—those means by

The frontier newspapers and the coverage of the Plains Indian Wars

This book offers a revealing look at how newspapers covered the key events of the Plains Indian Wars between 1862-1891-reporting that offers some surprising viewpoints as well as biases and misrepresentations. * Includes historical photos of prominent Native Americans and a scene of the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre * Presents an extensive bibliography of books, articles, and a list of frontier newspapers that served as primary source material

Black Elk speaks: being the life story of a holy man of the Oglala Sioux

If any great religious classic has emerged in this century or on this continent, it must certainly be judged in the company of Speaks...The most important aspect of the book, however, is not its effect on the non-Indian populace who wished to learn something of the beliefs of the Plains Indians but upon the contemporary generation of young Indians who have been aggressively searching for roots of their own in the structure of universal reality. To them the book has become a North American bible of all tribes. - Vine Deloria, Jr. experience of Black Elk...comes to one great statement, which for me is a key statement to the understanding of myth and symbols. - Joseph Campbell in an interview with Bill Moyers, Power of Myth. His meeting with the Sioux holy man Black Elk, John G. Neihardt once said, the most memorable experience of his life. In 1930, while working on the concluding poem of his Cycle of the West, Neihardt had gone to the Pine Ridge Reservation hoping to find some old medicine man who had been active in the Messiah Movement and who might be induced to talk with me about the deeper spiritual significance of the matter. In Neihardt, Black recognized the one who had been sent to learn what was given to me for men. The next summer, in a long series of talks, Black imparted his own life story and the story of the Oglala Sioux during the tragic decades of the Custer battle, the ghost dance, and the Wounded Knee massacre. Speaks, originally published in 1932, is venerated by many who have become alarmed at the declining spiritual and material quality of life in the age of computers and Star Wars. While the elec-tronic media purvey fragmented images of tragic schisms, Elk offers an eloquent and profound vision of the unity of all creation.

Buffalo nation: American Indian efforts to restore the bison

The gruesome story of the devastation of buffalo herds in the late nineteenth century has become uncomfortably familiar. A less familiar story, but a hopeful one for the future, is Ken Zontek's account of Native peoples' efforts to repopulate the Plains with a healthy, viable bison population. Interspersing scientific hypothesis with Native oral traditions and interviews, Buffalo Nation provides a brief history of bison and human interaction from the Paleolithic era to present preservation efforts. Zontek's history of bison restoration efforts is also a history of North American Native peoples' pursuit of political and cultural autonomy, revealing how Native peoples' ability to help the bison has fluctuated with their overall struggle. Beginning in the 1870s, Native North Americans established captive bison breeding programs despite the Wounded Knee Massacre and a massive onslaught on Native cultural and religious practices. These preservation efforts were so successful that a significant percentage of bison today carry the bloodlines of these original Native-sponsored herds. At the end of the twentieth century, more than fifty tribes banded together to form the Intertribal Bison Cooperative. This group has made significant progress in restoring bison herds in the United States, while Canadian First Nations work with national parks and other government entities to select and manage free-ranging herds. Buffalo Nation offers insights into the ways that the Native North American effort to restore the buffalo nation inspires discourse in cultural perseverance, environmentalism, politics, regionalism, spirituality, and the very essence of human-animal interaction.

God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land: Faith and Conflict in the American West (review)

Reviewed by: God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land: Faith and Conflict in the American West Anna Thompson Hajdik God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land: Faith and Conflict in the American West. By Todd M. Kerstetter. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 222. Acknowledgments, map, notes, index. ISBN 0253030389. $36.00, cloth.) Conflicts between the federal government and religious groups outside the mainstream and how those conflicts have uniquely shaped the identity of the American West is Todd Kerstetter's main focus in his new book. As Kerstetter illustrates, this theme runs deep in American history. He specifically argues, "Despite the West's well-deserved reputation for individuality and opportunity, the region has had little room for certain types of dissenters" (p. 12). Indeed the cover illustration, the inferno that engulfed the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in April 1993 is a vivid example of this conflict and remains one of the more searing images in our nation's recent past. The first chapter provides an overview of religion's role in the formation of American identity as well as an examination of how religion has shaped the American West from the origins of Pentecostalism to the attraction of unconventional religious groups to the region, such as the Rajneesh in Oregon. Kerstetter places his work in the realm of New Western history drawing from the writings of Patricia Nelson Limerick as well as more general scholarship on religion in America. This chapter acts as a bridge to the three case studies Kerstetter explores: the Mormons—specifically the Utah War of 1857–58, the Wounded Knee Massacre in December of 1890, and the Branch Davidian/BATF siege in the spring of 1993. The first case study on the Mormons covers familiar ground with regard to the history of the religion's founding and the persecution the group faced as it migrated from Missouri to Illinois and finally Utah. Kerstetter's examination is particularly [End Page 562] strong when he couches his analysis against the broader backdrop of American history. The significance of the Mexican-American War in easing the migration of the Mormons to Utah and the explicit emergence of anti-Mormon sentiment at the federal level in 1856 are highlights. The next chapter focuses on the Ghost Dancer segment of the Lakota Tribe near the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Special attention is paid to the skirmishes between the federal government and the Lakota, culminating in the death of Sitting Bull and the tragedy at Wounded Knee. Kerstetter emphasizes the media's role in fostering white hysteria of Ghost Dancers and their militant beliefs. "The press regarded even traditional dances with suspicion, fearing that the news of the Indian messiah and the Ghost Dance would turn other dances dangerous to whites and spread 'hysteria' among tribes," writes Kerstetter (p. 103). Finally, the case of the Branch Davidians again emphasizes the role of the media in portraying the sect's leader, Vernon Wayne Howell, later known as David Koresh, as a dangerous cult leader who brainwashed his followers. After the event's outcome, serious questions emerged about the government's handling of the siege. As Kerstetter points out, Waco's newspaper, the Waco Tribune Herald, despite intense vilification of Koresh, opined, "'Rambo-style assaults by enforcement agencies' seriously hurt the government's credibility with law abiding Americans" (p. 162). Kerstetter too often relies on secondary source material, particularly in the case of the Branch Davidians, where firsthand interviews with survivors and participating federal agents, as well as residents in Waco, would have added much dimension to the book. He instead relies on newspaper articles and previous scholarship to flesh out his analysis. While media analysis is helpful, particularly in the other two case studies in making relevant connections across time, the lack of engagement with primary sources in the case of Davidians is a bit glaring. Overall, however Kerstetter's analysis is tightly argued and would be appropriate for courses that address religion or the history of the American West. Anna Thompson Hajdik University of Texas at Austin Copyright © 2007 The Texas State Historical Association

The Buffalo Commons: Its Antecedents and Their Implications

Over the last 150 years, the North American Great Plains, once a region of native grasses and wildlife, has become largely agricultural. During the same time, however, many have responded to the changes' environmental, social and economic costs by proposing preservation. In the December 1987 issue of Planning, we contended that the future of the rural parts of the region lay in a vision we called the Buffalo Commons. To us the Buffalo Commons meant more bison and less cattle, more preservation and ecotourism and less conventional rural development and extraction--in short, a Great Plains that nurtured land uses that fell between intensive cultivation on the one side and wilderness on the other. The Buffalo Commons provoked much debate and led, directly or indirectly, to many public and private Plains initiatives that went in its direction. This article places our idea in historical context by examining it, its precedents, and the implications of both. In the Native American period the Plains amounted to a sort of Buffalo Commons. In the Euroamerican period numerous observers have suggested variations on Buffalo Commons-style preservation, conservation, or set-asides. George Catlin offered the earliest suggestion for a Great Plains Park in 1842, and the photographer L.A. Huffman had a similar idea in the early 1880s. The environmentally and politically restorationist Plains advocacy of the Indian prophet Wovoka led to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. In the twentieth century proposals for versions of the Buffalo Commons came from the Agriculture Department official Lewis Gray; Interior Department Secretary Harold Ickes; biologist V.H. Cahalane; economist Herbert Stein; geographers Daniel Luten and Bret Wallach; and novelists Sharon Butala, Tom Clancy, James Michener and (in the twenty-first century) Annie Proulx, among many others. The Buffalo Commons is effective in part because it echoes this broad and varied group of thinkers. We suggest that the long-term persistence of such a controversial idea means that portions of it will continue to find success as well as resistance.

Impertinences: selected writings of Elia Peattie, a journalist in the Gilded Age

Impertinences: Selected Writings of Elia Peattie is a collection of articles, editorials, and narratives by Elia Peattie written during her tenure at the Omaha World-Herald from 1888 to 1896, richly illustrated with photographs from the period. Elia (Wilkinson) Peattie (1862-1935) was born during the Civil War and came of age at the advent of the era of the New Woman. In many ways Peattie embodied this new age of independence for women, writing both fiction and journalism and becoming one of the first Plains women to write editorial columns in a major newspaper that addressed public issues. Not shy with her opinions about current events in the state of Nebraska in the late nineteenth century, Peattie tackled subjects such as the Wounded Knee Massacre, capital punishment and lynchings, prostitution, the Omaha stockyards, beet-field workers in Grand Island, schools and child rearing, the need for orphanages, shelters for unwed mothers, charity hospitals, and the New Woman. Editor Susanne George Bloomfield includes a biography of Peattie, who is described as tall, dignified, and kindly, and possessing a wicked sense of humor. Peattie's work now stands as a rare and valuable history of Nebraska, showing us a lively frontier society through the eyes of a woman engaged in the life of her community and her own struggle to balance her family and career

Wounded Knee and the Prospect of Pluralism

Wounded Knee and the Prospect of Pluralism Scott L. Pratt In the 1880s, a new religion called the Ghost Dance emerged in the Northwestern United States among the Native peoples there. What followed was a struggle to understand the meaning of the religion by European Americans, a struggle that led, on December 29, 1890, to the Wounded Knee Massacre. In this paper, I consider the process by which the Ghost Dance came to be understood by non–Native Americans. I argue that contemporary efforts were marked by two philosophical commitments: naturalism and ontological reductionism. These commitments left European America with few choices in how to respond to the practitioners of the Dance. After Wounded Knee, Charles Eastman, a Lakota trained in Western medicine and author of a series of books on Native culture and philosophy, offered an alternative philosophical perspective—pluralism—as a better way to understand Native traditions and as a means to foster coexistence. Along with Eastman, other non-Native thinkers also sought a viable form of pluralism to respond to the burgeoning religious and cultural diversity that marked the turn of the nineteenth century. I conclude by considering the conceptions of pluralism developed by William James and John Dewey in relation to the Ghost Dance and to the pluralism offered by Eastman. In the spring of 1890, a Cheyenne named Kicking Bear addressed a Lakota council. In his address, Kicking Bear described a journey to the Great Spirit, who entrusted him with a message for all Native American peoples. The journey had begun at the Cheyenne reservation and proceeded at first by railroad. When the tracks ended, Kicking Bear disembarked and met two companions—witnesses, he said—whom he had not met before. After the three men ate, they mounted horses and set off past the point where "white men had cause to go." As they crossed this border they encountered a black man who offered them wealth as long as they were willing to go no further down the trail. Kicking Bear and his companions turned away from the temptation and traveled two more days. As they reached the limit of their endurance, they encountered a man who seemed both white and Indian. This man fed Kicking Bear and his companions and then led them up a ladder to a place above the clouds that was the camp of the Great Spirit and his wife. From this place, through "an opening in the sky," [End Page 150] their guide showed them a vision of "all the countries of the earth" repopulated by Native people and great herds of buffalo. After a proper welcome, the Great Spirit addressed his visitors. "Take this message to my red children," he began, "and tell it to them as I say it." The earth, he explained, was getting old and it was time for renewal for the sake of the Great Spirit's people. "I will cover the earth with new soil to a depth of five times the height of a man and under this new soil will be buried all of the whites, and all the holes and the rotten places filled in." Indigenous plants and animals would be restored to the land and Native peoples would again "eat and drink, hunt, and rejoice." As the people await the coming renewal, the Great Spirit directed that they learn to perform certain dances and perform them regularly. When the Great Spirit was finished speaking and the men had eaten, their guide, who they realized was the Messiah, led them back to earth so that Kicking Bear could deliver his message, verified by the witnesses who had accompanied him.1 By the fall of 1890, the message of Kicking Bear and several other Native prophets had spread throughout much of the Northwest and the northern plains.2 As the movement, by then called the "Ghost Dance," spread, European Americans in the United States began to take notice. On November 16, 1890, the New York Times published a long article titled "The New Indian Messiah." The report tells of the encounters of Sitting Bull (an Arapahoe man) and Porcupine (a member of the Cheyenne) with the Messiah described by Kicking Bear and...

Captive Minds: New Worlds and Old Metaphors

The following essay discusses the politics of naming Native Americans at the end of the nineteenth century. At the time of the Wounded Knee massacre and the official "close" of the American geographical frontier, American mainstream identity had lost its earlier clarity. The attention to historical contextualization in particular suggests some of the ways in which the process of naming relates to the larger contested practice of shaping American national and cultural identities.

The return to the sacred path: Healing the historical trauma and historical unresolved grief response among the lakota through a psychoeducational group intervention

This article, based on research conducted with Lakota human service providers, concludes that the Lakota (Teton Sioux) suffer from impaired grief of an enduring and pervasive quality. Impaired grief results from massive cumulative trauma associated with such cataclysmic events as the assassination of Sitting Bull, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the forced removal of Lakota children to boarding schools. The research studied a culturally syntonic four‐day psychoeducational intervention designed to initiate a grief resolution process for a group of 45 Lakota human service providers. The methodology included assessment at three intervals: (a)apre‐ and post‐test, utilizing a Lakota Grief Experience Questionnaire andthe semantic differential, (b) a self report evaluation instrument at the end of the intervention, and (c) a six‐week follow‐up questionnaire. The results confirmed the hypotheses that: (a) education about historical trauma would lead to increased awareness of the impact and associated grief related affects of the traumatic Lakota history, (b) sharing these affects with other Lakota in a traditional context would provide cathartic relief, and (c) grief resolution would be initiated, including a reduction in grief affects, more positive identity, and a commitment to individual and community healing.

Native American Autobiography: An Anthology

Native American Autobiography: An Anthology. Arnold Krupat. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xi + 546 pages, 20 illustrations. $17.95. While the past three decades have seen a burst of creative work and attending literary scholarship in Native American studies, there has been a dearth of work on Native American autobiography. Only a handful of texts exist by a limited number of scholars such as Arnold Krupat, David Brumble, Hertha Wong, Jane Katz, and Gretchen Batille and Kathleen Mullen Sands. scarcity of such work can be attributed, in part, to the problematic nature of the genre itself. In his latest contribution to Native American Studies, Arnold Krupar has assembled a useful collection of autobiographical excerpts entitled Native American Autobiography: An Anthology designed for use in schools. Writing for an audience unfamiliar with the issues surrounding Native American autobiography, Krupat lays out a concise discussion of the field and its problems which he has explored in other works, most fully in For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (1985). Briefly, Krupat notes that both the auto and graph elements of the genre pose problems when applied to traditional, indigenous cultures. Western autobiography, celebrating the autonomous individual pitted against and victorious over social and cultural obstacles, is alien to communal-based cultures of Native America. western tradition of a sequential, cumulative narration of a life, as well as the written aspect of autobiography, also conflicted with the traditions of Native America. Indigenous people recorded important events orally, performatively, and dramatically to an audience, even pictographically; but alphabetic writing was not practiced by Native Americans, Krupat argues. This situation changed as Native people came into contact with invader-settlers, resulting in two genres of life stories that Krupat identifies as autobiography by Indians--narratives written by the story's subject him/herself--and autobiography--narratives written by an outsider, usually white, about an individual Native American. Both forms require careful scrutiny for their context and subtext. Krupat has divided the anthology into seven sections. Except for Part One, the anthology moves chronologically from the eighteenth century to the present, tracing the development of Native American and white relations and the autobiographical texts which result from this intersection. Each section contains four to five excerpts from previously published life stories. Krupat prefaces each section with a discussion of historical and cultural aspects which influenced the creation of the texts represented and which also serve as an ordering principle for that section. Part Two, The Christian Indians, from the Eighteenth Century to Indian Removal, 1830 focuses on the Indian reaction to the white settlers and their ultimate decision to become Christian in the face of Euramerican invasion. Christianized Indians provided some of the earliest written documents because they learned to read when converted by the Christian missionaries. Parts Three through Five, The Resisting Indians, from Indian Removal to Wounded Knee, 1830-90, The Closed Frontier, 1890-, and The Anthropologist's Indians, 1900- include narratives written against the backdrop of events like Indian Removal Act, and the infamous Trail of Tears where, of the twelve thousand Cherokees forced to march west of the Mississippi, four thousand died along the way. nineteenth century was characterized by Andrew Jackson's anti-Indian settlement, the famous figures Geronimo and Black Hawk, the Dawes Act disbanding the 138,000 acres of Indian land and reducing it to 48,000-55,000 acres of poor land, the Ghost Dance, the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the Census's now famous report which announced the Closing of the American Frontier. …

"The Deaths of Sybil Bolton"; An American History

Dennis McAuliffe, an assistant foreign editor at the WASHINGTON POST and recent embracer of his Osage past, has written a book which is ostensibly about the deaths of his Osage grandmother and other oil-rich Osages in the 1920s. For those who don't know the story or who have only read Linda Hogan's dubious account in her novel MEAN SPIRIT, it is a stunning moment in 20th century Native history. years leading up to the Great Depression were brutal ones for Osages, as the spectacular wealth from one of the continent's richest oil fields drew every manner of white opportunist to Osage County to attempt to cash in on the spectacular wealth of the tribe's members. Most of the activity was simple entrepreneurship, but plenty of what happened was criminal-lawyers, doctors, thugs, and thieves scheming and conspiring to separate Osages from their money. most notorious plot involved a white man, William Hale, who married an Osage woman, Mollie Kyle, then began having various of her relatives killed off. He hoped that by doing so, his wife would inherit more and more shares of Osage oil wealth. Then he would kill her. Dozens of other Osages were killed under similar mysterious circumstances in the 1920s. Walking through an Osage cemetery and seeing the gravestones that show the inordinate numbers of young people who died in the period is chilling. The Osage Reign of Terror, as newspapers of the time dubbed those years, has left an indelible mark on the psychology of Osages then and now. Linda Hogan loosely based MEAN SPIRIT on these events, earning for herself the scorn of many Osages in the process. She, in effect, de-Osaged the story, picking and choosing what she liked about the particulars of history and inventing new material for what she didn't-sort of like, and I don't choose the analogy lightly, finding the Holocaust a rich source, but not finding Jewish people interesting enough to be the subjects of their own history. In place of Osage spirituality, for instance, Hogan uses a sort of pan-tribal New Age-ism with Southern Plains and Southeastern (Hogan is Chickasaw) features, presumably making it easier for her inter-tribal cast of characters to interact but losing the specificity of Osages in the process. Osage reception of the novel has been cool at best, downright hostile at worst. One Osage friend of mine, a poet, publicly criticized the book and her audience dismissed the criticism. My friend, they said, was merely jealous. But there's more to the criticism than jealousy. Imagine a Minneconjou reaction to a story loosely based on the Wounded Knee Massacre that decided the Sioux and the Ghost Dance weren't alluring enough, so inserted some hing else in their place. Or, for that matter, remember the reaction of some Comanches to Kevin Costner's film Dances With Wolves, which when it was a novel was based on them. John Joseph Mathews (1894-1979), a member of the tribe, based his only published novel, SUNDOWN (1934) in the period of th murders. Unlike Hogan, Mathews allows the Osages to be Osages and presents a picture of a community i spiritual, social, and psychic crisis. Along the way, he shows how the two ends of the Osage political sp ctrum-the s vereignty-minded, full-blood faction and he progressive, cooperationist, mixed-blood faction-fared. Th traditionalists, in his account, lived in greater relative danger than the progressives, the wrong-headed assumption being that people from the full-blood families would be asier to dupe out of their money. Many progressives, on the other hand, ended up largely penniless by the end, having invested in businesses that didn't work or having thrown away their money on frivolous goodies. SUNDOWN is one of the least-read by Osages of Mat ews's books. His own odd placement in the tribe as the son of a trader (and really not part of the progressives and certainly not of the full-bloods) who was Osage inspired suspicion of him among many Osages in his own time, as it still does today. large number of frauds on the tribal roll of 1906 stand partially behind that suspicion, in spite of the fact that Mathews could trace his own history b ck (albeit four generations) to the Osage woman who marr ed his Anglo-American great grandfather. And Mathews lived most of his life on the Osage Reservation (then Osage County, Oklahoma), spoke some Osage, comprehe ded more, and served as a crucial member of the Osage Tribal Council from 1934 to 1942.

Ghost Songs : Echoes from Wounded Knee

The Ghost Dance of the Lakota is irretrievably linked to the infamous Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. An examination of the cultural elements comprising the philosophy practice of the ritual reveals a distinct form of religious worship that is undeniably Lakota. An analysis of fourteen Ghost Dance songs demonstrates that the Lakota version of the dance was unique to the Great Plains where it survived for only a year. It is concluded that if the Ghost Dance had not been adopted by the Lakota, other rituals would have been adopted to satisfy the Lakota's sense of what they perceive to be their own unique culture.

Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman, 1885-91

'A woman ahead of her time, the 'Little Sister' ...adds unique and fascinating chapter to the literature of the West' - Pacific Historian. 'We must be impressed by this talented woman who gave herself so completely to the people she chose to serve. Her story is fascinating, real contribution to the history of the period' - American Indian Quarterly. 'It is particularly refreshing to see Indian women viewed through the eyes of another woman' - Valerie Sherer Mathes, North Dakota History. 'It was held distinct adventure back in the demure 1880s for properly brought-up New England girl to open day school in primitive Sioux village,' Elaine Goodale Eastman recalled in later years.With boundless energy and dedication she had set out to teach the white man's ways to the Sioux. The Indian women called her little sister as she entered wholeheartedly into village activities. She watched the emergence of the Ghost Dance religion, visited with Sitting Bull shortly before his death, and was at Pine Ridge during the last month of 1890 - a time of grim suspense. There she met her future husband, Dr. Charles Eastman, the agency physician and mixed-blood Sioux. A short time later they shared in the heart-wrenching job of caring for the survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre. Kay Graber, editor emeritus at the University of Nebraska Press, is also editor of Standing Bear & the Ponca Chiefs (Nebraska 1995).