The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  Black Elk decided to do what many men—including famous chiefs and warriors—did once open hostilities were over: he joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. He toured all over the United States and Europe acting out in front of astonished audiences the very battles (like Custer’s Last Stand) in which he had participated. How surreal it must have been: to act in the myth machine while the real life for which he’d fought so hard was passing beyond his reach. He eventually returned and was living with his mother near Wounded Knee on that cold, clear December 29 in 1890 when the government surrounded Spotted Elk’s band of Miniconjou and Hunkpapa at Wounded Knee Creek. Black Elk was not in the initial assault at Wounded Knee. He arrived with reinforcements—after the band was surrounded and disarmed, after Black Coyote’s rifle went off, after the soldiers opened up with their Hotchkiss guns, after the soldiers trained their cannons and guns from the high ground down onto the men, women, and children running for their lives, down the gully and onto the plain. Armed only with a bow for which he had no arrows, Black Elk charged the soldiers repeatedly. When they scattered, he helped what Indians he could to safety. But Black Elk and the others fighting with him weren’t able to dislodge the soldiers completely, and singly and in small groups they began to melt away, back to Pine Ridge Agency.

  Black Elk was shaken by what he’d seen, “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. But before I went there I wanted to have revenge. I thought there might be a day, and we should have revenge . . .” Before he could get his revenge, however, Black Elk had “one last obligation” to fulfill. “He plucked up the orphaned baby he’d stowed in a place of safety. He saw now it was a girl. He held her close and kept his buckskin at an easy gait so the girl would not be jostled. He rode back to the Agency and hunted for the family. In time, she would be adopted by the father of his future wife and named Blue Whirlwind. Other infants would be plucked up by warriors and taken home that day. Many would be adopted by the families of their saviors.”

  The next day, while riding up White Clay Creek toward another spasm of the fighting that was rippling across the area, Black Elk was shot. “All this time the bullets were buzzing around me and I was not touched. I was not even afraid. It was like being in a dream about shooting. But just as I had reached the very top of the hill, suddenly it was like waking up, and I was afraid. I dropped my arms and quit making the goose cry. Just as I did this, I felt something strike my belt as though some one had hit me there with the back of an ax. I nearly fell out of my saddle, but I managed to hold on, and rode over the hill. An old man by the name of Protector was there, and he ran up and held me, for now I was falling off my horse. I will show you where the bullet struck me sidewise across the belly here (showing a long deep scar on the abdomen). My insides were coming out. Protector tore up a blanket in strips and bound it around me so that my insides would stay in. By now I was crazy to kill, and I said to Protector: ‘Help me on my horse! Let me go over there. It is a good day to die, so I will go over there!’ But Protector said: ‘No, young nephew! You must not die to-day. That would be foolish. Your people need you. There may be a better day to die.’ He lifted me into my saddle and led my horse away down hill. Then I began to feel very sick.” Soon after, African American regiments (Buffalo Soldiers) showed up and reinforced the Seventh Cavalry, and the fighting was over.

  Though the fighting was over, life was not. Black Elk married and had a family. He converted to Catholicism and became a catechist at the Catholic church in Pine Ridge. Many Indians prefer not to think about Black Elk’s later years and consider his conversion as a kind of surrender, a confirmation that the old ways were in fact dead. Maybe, maybe not. Black Elk was determined to live and to adapt. That doesn’t make him less of an Indian, as I see it; it makes him more of one.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WERE A FEW SKIRMISHES after Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Minnesota. But most of the most famous chiefs—Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, Bagone-giizhig, Tecumseh, Black Hawk, Cochise, Quanah Parker—were either dead, imprisoned, or in retirement. At the time of first contact, around 1500 CE, Indian populations in North America had been, according to sober estimates, around five million. There were more than five hundred distinct tribes spread over the entire continent—from the Florida Keys to the Aleutian Islands. The deserts of the American Southwest hosted some of the most advanced social groups, who built cities that still stand today. At the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi, where St. Louis now stands, was a city of more than twenty thousand. Along the resource-rich Eastern Seaboard, the coast was populated, without break, from Florida to Newfoundland. But four hundred years of warfare, disease, and starvation had taken its toll. According to the U.S. Census, there were only 237,000 Indians in the United States in 1900.

  The story of the land parallels that of the population. The United States comprises 2.4 billion acres. By 1900, Indians “controlled” only 78 million acres, or about 3 percent. As we’ve seen, this outcome wasn’t the result of a single regime or episode or factor, and it didn’t happen overnight. But Wounded Knee came to stand in for all of it: the final blow, a full stop to a long sentence of pain and dispossession.

  Wounded Knee has been seen not only as the end of Indian life but also as the end of a kind of American life. The frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner posited, had made America what it was. But the frontier was closed, and its memory was already being turned into myth in dime novels, westerns, and Wild West shows. Indians were on the way out, moving from a life in the world to a kind of museum existence. The guns were cleaned and put away, and the dirty work of death by administration and display begun. What would happen to American innovation? To the perfection of democracy? To the American Dream itself?

  But not so fast.

  As I’ve tried to show in the preceding pages, Indians lived on, as more than ghosts, as more than the relics of a once happy people. We lived on increasingly invested in and changed by—and in turn doing our best to change—the American character.

  It pains me to think about Wounded Knee. It also pains me, for different reasons, to read about it in books like Dee Brown’s. What hurts is not just that 150 people were cruelly and viciously killed. It is that their sense of life—and our sense of their lives—died with them. We know next to nothing about them. Who among them was funny? Who kicked his dog? Were they unfaithful, or vain, or fond of sweets? The tiny, fretful, intricate details are what make us who we are. And they are lost again and again when we paint over them with the tragedy of “the Indian.” In this sense, the victims of Wounded Knee died twice—once at the end of a gun, and again at the end of a pen.

  We die, too, in our own minds. And this is perhaps the saddest death of all. We are so used to telling the stories of our lives, and those of our tribes, as a tragedy, as a necessarily diminishing line—once we were great, once we ruled everything, and now we rule nothing, now we are merely ghosts that haunt the American mind—that we deprive ourselves of the very life we yearn for. I cannot shake the belief that the ways in which we tell the story of our reality shapes that reality: the manner of telling makes the world. And I worry that if we tell the story of the past as a tragedy, we consign ourselves to a tragic future. If we insist on raging against our dependency on the United States and modernity itself, we miss something vital: as much as our past was shaped by the whims and violence of an evolving America, America, in turn, has been shaped by us.

  The violence itself was certainly influenced by the shifting frontier of conflict between tribes and settlers. As Am
erica emerged from its adolescence in the early 1800s, the question of how the federal government would work with and against the states it united was thrown into doubt by the Indian removals from the Southeast. The modern Supreme Court was shaped by the questions of community and obligation between the government and sovereign Indian nations throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. At Standing Rock, the water protectors have reminded us of pressing modern questions that are fundamental not only to Indian struggles but also to our national identity: What, and who, is most important? To what degree does and to what degree should the government privilege private property and corporate interests over the public good? And what, after all, is the public? In order to answer these questions, I think we have to find a new way to think. Black Elk mourned that a dream died in the snow at Wounded Knee. It is up to us to do the next thing: to dream a new one.

  Walter Benjamin, the German critic and thinker, wrote:

  To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. . . . In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

  Today is that “moment of danger.” This book is an attempt to rescue the dead from the enemy by looking beyond Wounded Knee. It is not about the heart that was buried in the cold ground of South Dakota but rather about the heart that beats on—among the Dakota, to be sure, but also among the Diné, Comanche, Ojibwe, Seminole, Miwok, Blackfeet, and the other tribes around the country. And while Wounded Knee was the last major armed conflict between Indian tribes and the U.S. government, there have been many battles since 1890: battles fought by Indian parents to keep their children, and by the children far away at boarding schools to remember and keep their families and, by extension, their tribes, close to their hearts; battles of Indian leaders to defeat allotment and other destructive legislation; battles of activists to make good on the promises their leaders couldn’t or wouldn’t honor; battles of millions of present-day Indians to be Indian and modern at the same time. We are, in a sense, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those hundreds who survived Wounded Knee and who did what was necessary to survive, at first, and then—bit by bit—to thrive.

  The how of the telling shapes the what. How we see the people, their lives, their actions, and the meanings that obtain from those lives and actions shapes the present and the possible future. This book is meant to tell the story of Indian lives, and Indian histories, in such a way as to render those histories and those lives as something much more, much greater and grander, than a catalog of pain. I have tried to catch us not in the act of dying but, rather, in the radical act of living. Because at the heart of the political convulsions that now grip the “lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” we love lies a human question. A simple one.

  What kind of country do we want to be? Is this government of ours one that should merely get out of the way so that America can once again be, in Ronald Reagan’s words, a place “in which people can still get rich”? Or is our government meant to be the angel (avenging or otherwise) of our better nature? It has always bothered me that the very idea of paying attention to or knowing Indian history is tinged with the soft compassion of the do-gooder, as a kind of voluntary public service, like volunteering at an after-school program. But if we treat Indian stories this way, we do more than relegate Indians themselves to history—as mattering only in relation to America’s deep and sometimes dark past. We also miss the full measure of the country itself. If you want to know America—if you want to see it for what it was and what it is—you need to look at Indian history and at the Indian present. If you do, if we all do, we will see that all the issues posed at the founding of the country have persisted. How do the rights of the many relate to the rights of the few? What is or should be the furthest extent of federal power? How has the relationship between the government and the individual evolved? What are the limits of the executive to execute policy, and to what extent does that matter to us as we go about our daily lives? How do we reconcile the stated ideals of America as a country given to violent acts against communities and individuals? To what degree do we privilege enterprise over people? To what extent does the judiciary shape our understanding of our place as citizens in this country? To what extent should it? What are the limits to the state’s power over the people living within its borders? To ignore the history of Indians in America is to miss how power itself works.

  John Adams, writing to Thomas Jefferson in 1816, urged him to remember that “Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak.” If anything, the lives of Indians—our struggles to and success in surviving—remind us that our souls have great power. We need to recall the mute agony of the Indian woman, her name lost to history, who was abducted by Columbus, given to Michele da Cuneo, sold, traded, raped, and likely consigned to the sea. We need to remember the strength and dignity of the Otoe chief Medicine Horse, who responded to the federal commissioner trying to take his land in 1873 by saying, “We are not children. We are men. I never thought I would be treated so when I made the Treaty.” We need to remember the anguish of the Indian father who received news of his daughter’s death at Flandreau Indian School in 1906: “Those that were with her say she did not suffer, but passed away as one asleep. Lizzie was one of our best girls. . . . I am very sorry that you could not have seen your daughter alive, for she had grown quite a little and improved much since you let her come here with me.” To remember these stories and all the others is to remain humble in power, and to be called to tend to the troubled soul of the country; it is to remember that our very lives exist at the far side of policy. It is to remember the good and the bad, the personal and the social, the large and the small. It is not to capture Indians, per se, but to capture the details of our lives. We are, for better or worse, the body of our republic. And we need to listen to it, to hear—beyond the pain and anger and fear, beyond the decrees and policies and the eddying of public sentiments and resentments, beyond the bombast and rhetoric—the sound (faint at times, stronger at others) of a heartbeat going on.

  Acknowledgments

  I began writing this book the week my father died in the winter of 2016. Not an easy time. I have felt both the loss of him and his presence every day since. And in the ultimate balance of things his presence is felt more keenly. But it was the living who made all the difference as I wrote and it is they I would like to thank. It is, of course, largely impossible to thank everyone who needs to be thanked here. This book sat in my mind for years before I sat down to write it. And when I did finally begin, that, too, took years. I owe a great debt to everyone at Riverhead Books and to my editor, Becky Saletan, in particular. You were patient, and brilliant, and when you said you wanted my best work, not my fastest, I took you at your word. I would also like to thank my agent extraordinaire, Adam Eaglin, for seeing the book inside the idea and for making everything possible. The School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe housed me for five months. The writing began there and wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. The peace and quiet coupled with the energy of brilliant colleagues was indispensable. I would also like to thank my students and colleagues at the University of Southern California. You kept me company through the long birth of the book and supported me intellectually and materially. Being a teacher keeps me awake, it keeps me alive and engaged. I owe you all. Most of all, I am indebted to my fellow Indians across the country. Bobby Matthews, Santee Frazier, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Red Hall, Pat Schildt, Dave Schildt, Sierra Fredrickson, Eddy Pablo, Gabe Galanda, Ray Sheldon, Sarah “Southside” Agaton Howes, Chelsey Luger, and more (many more) opened their homes and lives and hearts to
me. If I didn’t have space to mention you here, or if your stories didn’t end up in the book: you are not forgotten. Thank you. I like to think each of you in your own way did it not for me but to have a chance to come together to talk out our past with the idea that it will help create a better future for our people. I would also like to thank my family. My father and mother—Robert Treuer and Margaret Seelye Treuer—have always inspired me. I was not an easy child, and I apologize. I am not an easy man, and for that I also ask your forgiveness. My children endured long separations from me when I was on the road. I love you. More than anyone else, this book is for you. You are cheerful and smart and funny and interesting, curious, and kind: everything I hope to be someday. Also thanks to my inspiration and my love: Abi Levis. I couldn’t do this without you.

  A Note on Sources

  This book contains no composite characters or pseudonyms. All dialogue in quotation marks was recorded digitally. Reconstructed dialogue appears in italics. In the words of the inimitable Barbara Tuchman, “I have tried to avoid spontaneous attribution or the ‘he must have’ style of historical writing: ‘As he watched the coastline of France disappear, Napoleon must have thought back over the long . . .’ All conditions of weather, thoughts or feelings, and states of mind public or private in the following pages have documentary support.” I have tried my best to frame opinion as opinion and fact as fact, if for no other reason than that Indian lives and Indian history have long been given the fancy treatment of poetic and loose interpretation. If we are going to imagine our past and reimagine our future, we are going to have to do it with curiosity and care. This book is, obviously, a mélange of history, reportage, and memoir. It is also my take on things, my read of our shared Indian past, present, and future. Errors of fact are mine. Errors of perspective are mine as well. I have no doubt that had the writers and thinkers and Indian citizens on whom I’ve relied faced the same task, they would have written different books. For better or worse, this is mine.