The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  Notes

  Prologue

  It is estimated that by the late 1870s: “Time Line of the American Bison,” National Bison Range Wildlife Refuge Complex, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, https://www.fws.gov/bisonrange/timeline.htm.

  “The coming of the troops has frightened the Indians”: Quoted in H. W. Brands, The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 18.

  “there was a woman with an infant in her arms”: American Horse, quoted in “Documents Relating to the Wounded Knee Massacre” (personal accounts of Wounded Knee, from interviews by Eli S. Ricker; Black Elk Speaks; reports and testimony relating to the Army investigation of the Battle of Wounded Knee and the Sioux Campaign of 1890–1891) (ID 1101), Digital History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1101.

  “Helpless children and women with babes in their arms”: John A. Haymond, The American Soldier, 1866–1916: The Enlisted Man and the Transformation of the United States Army (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018), 237.

  “they can go about getting it”: Kevin Abourezk, “From Red Fears to Red Power: The Story of the Newspaper Coverage of Wounded Knee 1890 and Wounded Knee 1973” (master’s thesis, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2012), 39, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1029&context=journalismdiss.

  General Nelson Miles relieved Colonel James Forsyth: Peter R. DeMontravel, A Hero to His Fighting Men: Nelson A. Miles, 1839–1925 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), 204–7.

  “Why should we spare even a semblance”: Ibid., 207.

  “the miserable wretches” . . . “The Pioneer has before declared”: Quoted in Ned Halley, afterword to L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz [sic] (London: Collector’s Library, 2009), 177.

  “The United States lies like a huge page”: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Frontier in American History” (1893), in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), 12.

  “We shall never be happy here any more”: Simon Pokagon, The Red Man’s Rebuke (Hartford, MI: C. H. Engle, 1893), 12–13.

  “What is life?”: Quoted in post to Native History Magazine, February 18, 2013, http://www.nativehistorymagazine.com/2013/02/chief-crowfoot-on-life-and-death.html.

  “greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation”: Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970; New York: Henry Holt, 1970, 2000), xxiii.

  “If the readers of this book”: Ibid., xxv.

  “Men make their own history”: Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (CreateSpace, 2013), 7 (trans. Saul K. Padover, from 1869 German edition).

  Part 1. Narrating the Apocalypse: 10,000 BCE–1890

  The Spanish crown in particular had depleted its resources: Simon Newman, “Merchants in the Middle Ages,” The Finer Times, http://www.thefinertimes.com/Middle-Ages/merchants-in-the-middle-ages.html; and Allen Pikerman, “The Iberian Golden Age: European Expansion: Exploration and Colonization, 1400–1650,” 2002, International World History Project, http://history-world.org/iberian_golden_age.htm.

  The effects were dramatic: Newman, “Merchants in the Middle Ages.”

  “While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman”: Klaus Brinkbäumer and Clemens Höges, The Voyage of the Vizcaína: The Mystery of Christopher Columbus’s Last Ship, trans. Annette Streck (New York: Harcourt, 2006), 156. Also found at Katie Halper, “Five Scary Christopher Columbus Quotes That Let You Celebrate the Holiday the Right Way,” Raw Story, October 13, 2014, https://www.rawstory.com/2014/10/five-scary-christopher-columbus-quotes-that-let-you-celebrate-the-holiday-the-right-way/.

  “‘enemies of the Catholic church’”: Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 26.

  “Who is this Columbus who dares give out my vassals as slaves?”: Ibid., 28.

  “would have sent many Indians”: Quoted ibid. (emphasis in original).

  All had the same tale to tell: “Columbus Controversy,” History, https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/columbus-controversy.

  dated to as many as nineteen thousand years ago: Ann Gibbons, “Oldest Stone Tools in the Americas Claimed in Chile,” November 18, 2015, Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/oldest-stone-tools-americas-claimed-chile.

  Archaeological evidence: John E. Clark and Dennis Gosser, “Reinventing Mesoamerica’s First Pottery,” in The Emergence of Pottery: Technology and Innovation in Ancient Societies, ed. William K. Barnett and John W. Hoopes (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2015), 209–19, retrieved at http://users.clas.ufl.edu/dcgrove/mexarchreadings/reinventing.pdf.

  “to encourage them to abandon hunting”: “Jefferson’s Secret Message to Congress,” January 18, 1803, Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis & Clark and the Revealing of America, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/lewisandclark/transcript56.html.

  “I think our governments will remain virtuous”: Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters, http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1300.

  “To promote this disposition to exchange lands”: Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, February 27, 1803, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-39-02-0500.

  “wheresoever they may be found”: Laws of the Colonial and State Governments from 1633 to 1831 Inclusive (Washington, DC: Thompson and Romans, 1832), 186.

  “Neither superior technology”: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 96.

  When it concluded, the United States secured: Charles Flowers, Peter B. Gallagher, and Patricia Wickman, Seminole Timeline, Seminole Tribe of Florida, History, http://www.semtribe.com/History/TimelineText.aspx.

  “Am I a negro, a slave?”: Quoted in “Billy Bowlegs in New Orleans,” Harper’s Weekly, June 12, 1858, 376, https://archive.org/stream/harpersweek100bonn#page/376 [inactive] .

  As was typical, American losses were framed: Michael Warren, “Dade’s Massacre Reenacts Start of Second Seminole War,” http://floridatraveler.com/dades-massacre-recalls-seminole-history/.

  “The government is in the wrong”: Adam Wasserman, A People’s History of Florida 1513–1876: How Africans, Seminoles, Women, and Lower Class Whites Shaped the Sunshine State (Self-Published, 2009), 303.

  The total cost to fight the Seminole: “The Causes and Effects of the Seminole Wars,” Florida Memory, State Library & Archives of Florida, https://www.floridamemory.com/onlineclassroom/seminoles/lessonplans/4thgrade/4th-causes.php.

  Life seems to have been particularly good: Alice B. Kehoe, North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 209.

  “After around 3000 BCE”: Ibid., 32.

  One archaeological site in southern Maine: Ibid.

  Elaborate burial practices disappeared: Ibid.

  Bison were habituated: Nancy Blumenstalk Mingus, “Origin of the Name ‘Buffalo,’” from Buffalo: Good Neighbors, Great Architecture (Arcadia, 2003), http://www.buffaloah.com/h/bflo/origin.html.

  Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte-Real: Pietro Pasqualigo, ambassador to Portugal from Venice, to his brothers in Venice, October 19, 1501, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text1/gcreal.pdf.

  In 1580 an English crew who had landed in Maine: James Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 177.

  French explorers brought Indians back to France: Kehoe, North American Indians, 225.

  In 1592, well before the Seneca had direct: Mary Ellen Snodgrass, World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of Disease from Prehistory to the Era of Zika (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 56.

  “laughed his Enemies and
the Enemies of his People”: Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 151.

  In the various climates found in this vast and fecund area: Michael Perry, “Woodland Period,” 1996, Office of the State Archaeologist, University of Iowa, http://archaeology.uiowa.edu/woodland-period-0.

  In Ohio some mounds were found to contain: Alice Kehoe, North America Before the European Invasions, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 85.

  One burial mound at the Mound City: “Hopewell (1–400 A.D.),” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hope/hd_hope.htm.

  Large villages replaced small seasonal camps: “Mississippian Period AD 1100–1541,” Fort Smith National Historic Site (Arkansas), National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/fosm/learn/historyculture/mississippiperiod.htm.

  One burial site there contained twenty thousand shell beads: Jack Page, In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians (New York: The Free Press, 2003), 70–71.

  “made frequent signs to us to come on shore”: “The Great Lakes Fur Trade: All Because of a Beaver,” North West Company Fur Post, Minnesota Historical Society, http://sites.mnhs.org/sites/sites.mnhs.org.historic-sites/files/docs_pdfs/The_Great_Lakes_Fur_Trade.pdf.

  With the exception of the Huron: James F. Pendergast, “The Confusing Identities Attributed to Stadacona and Hochelaga,” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, no. 4 (Winter 1998), 149–67, https://utpjournals.press/doi/10.3138/jcs.32.4.149.

  The hope at Quebec was to catch furs: Michael McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2016), 29.

  “not permit any Nation to establish posts there”: Ibid., 152.

  “stabbed him to death”: Ibid., 154.

  “killed, boiled, and ate Memeskia”: Ibid.

  These were people who knew what they were doing: Page, In the Hands of the Great Spirit, 72.

  Contrary to the myth of the desert: “Sonoran Desert Network Ecosystems,” Sonoran Desert Inventory & Monitoring Network, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/im/sodn/ecosystems.htm.

  “one of the cleverest bits of passive solar architecture”: Page, In the Hands of the Great Spirit, 81.

  The Zuni seem to have been waiting for them: Ibid., 138–40.

  After three days they emerged: Ibid.

  Nevertheless, the U.S. government prevailed: Peter M. Whiteley, Deliberate Acts (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), 14–86.

  When the Americans arrived: Kehoe, North American Indians, 144.

  In 1863 the military launched: Ojibwa, “The Navajo Long Walk,” May 2, 2010, Native American Netroots, http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/487.

  It was a place apart: Robert Petersen, “California, Calafia, Khalif: The Origin of the Name ‘California,’” December 15, 2015, KCET, https://www.kcet.org/shows/departures/california-calafia-khalif-the-origin-of-the-name-california.

  It is estimated that in 1770: A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 78 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1925), 880–91.

  In 1832 the number was 14,000: Dorothy Krell, ed., The California Missions: A Pictorial History (Menlo Park, CA: Sunset Publishing, 1979), 316.

  “must be expected” that “a war”: Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 231.

  Farther inland, evidence is emerging: Loren G. Davis, “New Support for a Late-Pleistocene Coastal Occupation at the Indian Sands Site, Oregon,” Current Research in the Pleistocene 25 (2008), 74–76, retrieved at http://wpg.forestry.oregonstate.edu/sites/wpg/files/seminars/2008_DavisCRP.pdf. See also “Paisley Caves,” Archaeology, August 11, 2014, https://www.archaeology.org/issues/145-1409/features/2370-peopling-the-americas-paisley-caves; and “Paisley Caves,” The Oregon Encyclopedia, https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/paisley_caves/#.Ww3jM6kh2i4.

  Skeletal remains of (mostly) young men: Kehoe, North America Before the European Invasions, 106.

  Coastal populations that were around two hundred thousand: Robert Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline Among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999).

  At last, disease, exhaustion, and starvation: Native Voices (Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness), Timeline, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/308.html.

  One of the men, Kimasumpkin, protested: “Whitman Massacre Trial,” Highlights of the Oregon State Archives, http://sos.oregon.gov/archives/exhibits/highlights/Pages/whitman.aspx.

  “I was not present at the murder”: Quoted in William Parsons and W. S. Shiach, An Illustrated History of Umatilla County and of Morrow County ([San Francisco?]: W. H. Lever, 1902), 62.

  They adopted the bow and arrow around 500 BCE: Page, In the Hands of the Great Spirit, 47–49.

  They plied the lowlands of south and central Texas: “Coahuiltecan Indians,” Handbook of Texas Online, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/bmcah.

  By that time their population had dropped: S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (New York: Scribner, 2011), 274.

  “the tallest race of men in North America”: George Catlin, letter no. 30, Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians . . . (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1845), vol. 2, 40.

  When the ice sheet retreated: Alan J. Osborn, “Paleo-Indians,” Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.na.080.

  It wasn’t long, however, before the former: Francis Haines, “The Northward Spread of Horses Among the Plains Indians,” American Anthropologist 40, no. 3 (1938), 429–51.

  “There is something deeply ironic”: James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 248.

  Between ten thousand and fifteen thousand Blackfeet: Michael J. Ables, “Smallpox: The American Fur Company Pox Outbreak of 1837–1838,” Electronic Journals Hosted by University Libraries, Wichita State University, http://journals.wichita.edu/index.php/ff/article/viewFile/128/135.

  So it was not merely the Indians’ lack of immunity: Ibid.

  William Mayo: Helen Clapesattle, The Doctors Mayo, 2nd ed. (Rochester, MN: Mayo Clinic, 1969). Found also in James V. Fenelon, Redskins? Sports Mascots, Indian Nations and White Racism (New York: Routledge, 2017), 59–60; and in “Dakota War of 1862,” Alchetron, https://alchetron.com/Dakota-War-of-1862.

  “saw one squaw lying on the bank”: Quoted in Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (New York: Dover Books, 2003), 344; see also “The Sand Creek Massacre,” Native American Nations, http://www.nanations.com/dishonor/sand-creek-massacre.htm.

  “one little child”: Jackson, A Century of Dishonor, 344.

  Part 2. Purgatory: 1891–1934

  Kevin Washburn slips off his cowboy boots: Author interview with Kevin Washburn, March 11, 2016. All quotations of Washburn are from interviews with the author.

  “In case any agent of the ministry”: “July 1, 1775: Congress Resolves to Forge Indian Alliances,” This Day in History, History, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/congress-resolves-to-forge-indian-alliances.

  “I would recommend that some post in the center”: George Washington to Major General John Sullivan, May 31, 1779, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0661.

  The Oneida, despite being a member: “The Revolutionary War, Oneida’s Legacy to Freedom,” Oneida Indian Nation, http://www.oneidaindiannation.com/revolutionar
ywar/.

  Polly Cooper, an Oneida woman with the entourage: Alejandra Smith, “Oneida,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia, http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/article/oneida/.

  “The United States acknowledges the lands reserved to the Oneida”: “The Revolutionary War, Oneida’s Legacy to Freedom.”

  The Oneida contributions to American victory: Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 5.

  “The President is willing to grant them peace”: Donald L. Fixico, Bureau of Indian Affairs: Landmarks of the American Mosaic (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2012), 32.

  The commission also forced the Seminoles to sell: Ibid.

  “It does not seem a great task”: Ibid., 33.

  A Seneca, he was born and raised: “Ely Parker 1770–1844: Parker Family Tree,” A Warrior in Two Worlds: The Life of Ely Parker, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/warrior/content/timeline/crisis/parents.html.

  “‘to sound the war whoop and seize’”: C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy After the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 39.

  The Parker home became a meeting place: Ibid., 45.

  “We are all Americans”: Arthur C. Parker, The Life of General Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General Grant’s Military Secretary (Buffalo, NY: Buffalo Historical Society, 1919), 133, retrieved at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044014840516.