Someone owes Sam Eaglestaff an apology. The venerated Cheyenne River leader of the Wounded Knee Survivors Association left this life thinking we set the record straight on the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 when the United States apologized for it a century later.
There’s something in the American psyche that needs to record that massacre as a battle. A battle designation must make someone feel better about those 7th Cavalry soldiers winning Medals of Honor and about non-Indians continuing to occupy and reap gold riches from the Black Hills.
Alas, the latest public recounting of that history by HBO’s ”Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” puts us back to pre-1990 – back to a battle that no one can be blamed for. HBO gets points for humanizing some Native figures and for attempting to depict the Dawes allotment policies, but it missed the drama, conspiracies, contradictions and tensions of the time.
But it doesn’t show that the Sioux people were disarmed the night before the massacre or that the U.S. soldiers, still mad about Little Bighorn, then got drunk on rum. It doesn’t show that many of the soldiers were still drunk and hung over when they killed more than 300 Hunkpapa and Minneconjou people in less than an hour with rifles and Hotchkiss revolving cannons. It doesn’t show that the 25 Army soldiers who died were killed by friendly fire.
There are many reasons why making a movie about atrocities against Americans Indians is difficult. First, the history of covering up those atrocities is encrusted with time and deception and many Americans – historians, politicians and filmmakers among them – still deny that official exterminations ever took place.
Second, a simple folk narrative has evolved around mass executions, with themes that any school kid or president can understand, and the onus is on those who tell the tale a different way to prove it. The narrative goes like this: Europeans were led by the hand of God to this bountiful land and the Indians wouldn’t share and weren’t grateful for the land we gave them, so we had to move them and, yes, some bad white men did bad things and we’re sorry about that; and then there were the Indian wars, but the Indians started them.
Third, part of the cover-up was a federally mandated and implemented campaign of propaganda, undertaken officially and punitively in the name of civilization. That campaign was so successful that its targets –
Native peoples’ complex religions, sciences, medicines, governments, laws and lifeways – continue to be referred to in popular culture and historical, educational and scientific literature as myths and primitivism.
Fourth, the remaining Native people were so traumatized by the attempted genocide and dislocation, and were so fearful it would happen again, that most passed along the rage and sorrow and helplessness, but with little or no detail about what actually happened. When complete oral histories were passed on, they often carried stern warnings against seeking redress, challenging white people or even letting on that they knew the secret history.
Fifth, Native people were educated and socialized to believe the worst about their collective past and many had their histories, along with their languages and religions, beaten out of them in government programs.
Writers who take on this history must peel back layers and generations of prejudice, denial, propaganda and self-editing before they get to the core of truth. Then the problem becomes one of weight of evidence – hundreds of thousands of books and records as opposed to memories, most of which are not written anywhere.
Great respect must be paid to Dee Brown, who wrote ”Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” with a historian’s skill and a good heart. I asked his permission in 1970 to have Native people in New York City read his book aloud, a chapter a day, over WBAI-FM. He was enthusiastic about listeners hearing his work read by descendants of peoples he wrote about and sending the subliminal message, ”Indians are still here.” He later supported many Indian efforts for new laws, including the U.S. apology for the Wounded Knee Massacre.
In 1990, Oglala Attorney Mario Gonzalez and I worked on behalf of Eaglestaff and the Survivors Association to secure an apology for the massacre. We tried to convince the Defense Department to get its defenders to withdraw objections to an apology, but officials rejected our theory that the 1890 killings resulted from a 7th Cavalry grudge over Little Bighorn.
They understood that U.S. citizens and officials were still so afraid in 1890 that Native people weren’t allowed to leave reservations without written permission and weren’t allowed to pray or dance in their traditional ways or places. They accepted that federal Indian agents accused Chief Sitting Bull and Chief Big Foot of planning outbreaks and their names were given to the Army and Indian Police as ”fomenters of dissent,” and that participation in the ”Ghost Dance” or ”Messiah craze,” as it was known after the ”careful propaganda against the Dance,” was the official excuse and legal cause of action under the Civilization Regulations and Sitting Bull was killed when he resisted arrest.
They agreed that the two-day fight June 25 – 26, 1876, was really a battle with several fronts near the Little Bighorn River, and that it was incorrect to call it a massacre. They also admitted that the single hour of carnage of Dec. 29, 1890, along Wounded Knee Creek was a massacre, not a battle.
But Wounded Knee was 14 years after Little Bighorn. Would the soldiers have held a grudge that long and why would they take it out on Big Foot? They blamed Custer’s defeat on Sitting Bull, who was killed two weeks before Wounded Knee. The Survivors Association members had the answer: ”Because Big Foot was Sitting Bull’s half-brother. That’s why Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa people sought sanctuary in Big Foot’s Minneconjou camp.”
We got the apology for the massacre, but South Dakota Sens. Larry Pressler and Thomas Daschle would not permit the actual word ”apology” to be used.
So, it seems to me that someone between 1890 and today owes Sam Eaglestaff’s family an apology, and maybe Dee Brown’s family would appreciate one, too.
Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, is president of the Morning Star Institute in Washington, D.C., and a columnist for Indian Country Today.