Oyate - Avoid Wounded Knee

On December 28, 1890, the remnants of Big Foot’s band were camped not far from Wounded Knee Creek. They had been on their way to join Red Cloud at Pine Ridge when they were intercepted by the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s division. It was 40 degrees below zero of a South Dakota winter, the people were starving and they had no proper dress for this weather. The band at this point consisted mostly of women, children and older people. They had been herded by the soldiers into a ravine and were completely surrounded by military and armaments. Their leader, Big Foot, was dying of pneumonia. No people could have been less capable of defending themselves, never mind being a threat. They expected or were perhaps hopeful of continuing their journey on the next day.

The next morning, when the cavalry opened fire and the people realized what was happening, they grabbed up the children and babies and fled in terror. Only a few escaped and the rest—some 300 women and babies and old men—were mowed down. The men of Custer’s division were out for blood and revenge, and on December 29, 1890, they got it. Black Elk, who witnessed the massacre as a young man, later said that

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.

Yet the tragedy that became known as the Wounded Knee Massacre is consistently portrayed in children’s books and texts as a battle arising from a series of unfortunate cultural misunderstandings.

Neil Waldman’s treatment is no different. In Chapter 1, which is called “Massacre,” Waldman says,

Thus ended the last battle between two proud and warring peoples. It was the inevitable conclusion of the clash between two disparate nations, the end of the culture of nomadic hunters who had roamed the great plains of North America for centuries.

Wounded Knee has been praised as “sympathetic” and “balanced” and “nonjudgmental,” yet the question of just how a depiction of a massacre can be balanced has not been asked. Indeed, to present a “balanced” picture of a tragedy that is still being mourned more than 110 years later is not possible. On the scale of justice, some things are heavier than others, and genocide is one of them.

While Indian peoples were struggling to maintain land, culture, and community, the whites were trying to take it all away. And they did, by murder, by germ warfare, by wholesale kidnapping of children. How can anyone with integrity give a “balanced” account of that?

That hundreds of white people, including settlers, were killed in the Santee rebellion in Minnesota in 1862 is not disputed. This is Waldman’s version (italics mine):

The Santee planned to strike only the soldiers and their forts. But when they had ridden out into the settlements, years of pent-up frustration over their treatment on the reservation overcame them, and the Santee reverted to their traditional methods of warfare. Galloping through the countryside in small bands, they burned farms and houses, killed all the people they could find, scalped them and mutilated their bodies. When the violence ended, nearly 500 settlers were dead. Another 500 lost their homes.

In truth, the military decision to go to war against the whites was not an easy one. It was deliberated in council for a long time. After a small group of young men killed a settler family, it was argued that no Santee was safe from the whites, and that a preemptive strike would be more effective than a defensive battle. Little Crow argued against warring with the whites at this time, because the whites had a stronger military presence. But in the end, he reluctantly agreed.

While groups of undisciplined young men picked off the settlers and burned their farms, Little Crow led Santees, united with their Wahpeton, Sisseton and Mdewkanton cousins in war against the army. A month later, as Little Crow had predicted in council, they were defeated.

When it was over, the cavalry rounded up some 600 prisoners of war, and in individual military trials that lasted from five to fifteen minutes each, found 303 of them guilty and sentenced them to death. Of these, Abraham Lincoln ordered 38 executed, and on December 26, 1862, holding hands and singing their death songs, they climbed the scaffold and were hanged.

This was a bloody war, with many killed on both sides. It resulted in mass trials, and the largest mass execution in U.S. history, neither of which Waldman mentions. Instead, he simply and simplistically portrays the Indians as “reverting to their traditional methods of warfare,” galloping off to slaughter helpless settlers.

Throughout Chapter 1, Waldman paraphrases Black Elk Speaks without attribution. For instance, Black Elk’s “I painted my face all red, and in my hair I put one eagle feather for the One Above. It did not take me long to get ready, for I could still hear the shooting over there.” becomes Waldman’s “He hurriedly painted his face red. He wove an eagle feather into his hair.”

And in the few places where he actually quotes Black Elk, he does so ineffectually. For instance, Black Elk says:

Men and women and children were heaped and scattered all over the flat at the bottom of the little hill where the soldiers had their wagon-guns, and westward up the dry gulch all the way to the high ridge, the dead women and children and babies were scattered. When I saw this I wished that I had died too, but I was not sorry for the women and children. It was better for them to be happy in the other world, and I wanted to be there too.

Later that day, Black Elk walked out along the bloodstained banks of Wounded Knee Creek. He came upon the lifeless bodies of more than one hundred and forty men, women, and children. “When I saw this I wished I had died too,” Black Elk later lamented.

Throughout, Waldman peppers his text with unattributed dramatic scenarios, such as this:

As the earth was littered with their belongings, the braves glanced nervously at one another, sensing that a bloody confrontation loomed just ahead.

While appearing to be sympathetic, Waldman’s choice of words— “braves” and “warriors” instead of “men,” “chants” instead of “prayers,” “nomadic hunters” instead of “people”—distances the non-Indian child reader from the real people Waldman writes about. Here is an example (italics mine):

While these proud people were diminished and humiliated on the reservations, the leaders in Washington encouraged the destruction of the bison, the ancient food source of the Lakota as well as the other Plains tribes. They realized that once these beasts were gone, the Indians would no longer be able to live as nomadic hunters. It was their plan that all the Indians should eventually be forced onto farms, where they would no longer pose a threat to white society. And so the bison were systematically slaughtered. In the end, the great herds, which had once numbered in the millions, were brought to near extinction, and the families of the nomadic hunters began to starve.

This kind of writing encourages the non-Indian child reader to think in limited ways about Indian people: They were a threat to white society, so something had to be done. They became anachronistic in their own land and couldn’t keep up with civilization.

While this kind of writing encourages a sort-of sympathy, it discourages real empathy. Rather, it gives the non-Indian child reader a reason to feel that some of what happened is too bad, but it also keeps the reader from identifying with the Indian people.

I cannot imagine what could have motivated Waldman to write this book, other than to showcase his art. But Waldman’s impressionistic black-and-white and color acrylic paintings—mostly copied from the photographs of Edward S. Curtis and his contemporaries from the Smithsonian and Library of Congress collections—are nothing new and further distance the young reader from the real lives of real people. Young readers— both Indian and non-Indian—will do better reading Black Elk Speaks and Amy Erlich’s adaptation of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Be it noted: Twenty-eight members of the Seventh Cavalry received the Congressional Medal of Honor for their work in the “last great battle of the Indian Wars.”