Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  A society in which respect was achieved by the redistribution of wealth and rank was earned by merit, in which the natural and human worlds were intimately connected and revered, in which there was no real concept of personal property and life was communal, was pitted in the final Indian Wars against a society in which meaning was artificially constructed through the amassing of goods, power, social status, and money, a society run by an efficient and impersonal bureaucracy, a society dedicated to exploitation and profit, a society that believed in the twisted notion of regeneration through violence.

  The effect of this physical and moral cataclysm, this clash of civilizations, is being played out a century and a half later, as the whole demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, and imperial conquest implodes. Corporate hustlers, the heirs of Custer, are fervently rolling the dice as they exploit and poison us all in the last deadly chapter. They are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators, and railroad magnates, all of whom grew rich by seizing Indian land, killing those who stood in their way, extinguishing the buffalo herds, and cutting down the forests. It is our sad fate, and the fate of our children, to pay for their folly.

  Custer’s defeat became the rallying cry throughout the nation for a systematic and relentless campaign of genocide against Native Americans. It led to a massive and sustained military campaign of extermination, justified by the popular press in the name of revenge, and led by the Grant administration.13 The call for blood, and the celebration of Custer as an American hero, were nearly universal.

  By the end of the Indian Wars—which had erupted more than two centuries previously, with the Pequot War in the eastern North American continent between 1634 and 1638, and raged on the western plains from the end of the Civil War to 1890—hundreds of distinct indigenous cultures had been physically obliterated. An estimated two million indigenous people in the United States were reduced, through slaughter, starvation, and disease, to less than a quarter of a million people by 1900.14 By the late nineteenth century, more immigrants arrived in a single year in New York City’s slums, the fertile recruiting ground for the U.S. Army during the Indian Wars, than the total number of Native Americans left alive across the continent.

  “Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possession is a disease in them,” Sitting Bull said. “These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not. They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.15

  “We cannot dwell side by side,” Sitting Bull said. “Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? Or shall we say to them: ‘First kill me, before you can take possession of my fatherland!’”16

  The assault on Native American culture did not end with the forced settlement of Indians into what were, in essence, prisoner of war camps. In 1887, Congress passed Senator Henry Dawes’s General Allotment Act, usually called the Dawes Severalty Act.17 By the time Congress ended the allotment program in 1934, Indian lands had decreased from 136.3 million acres to 34.2 million acres. More than ninety thousand Indians had become landless.18 Hunting as a means of subsistence had ended.

  The language of paternalism, used by slave owners in the South to justify the bondage of African Americans, was also employed to justify turning Native Americans into imprisoned and impoverished wards of the state. The Dawes Act banned the practice of Native American culture, language, traditions, and religion. White Christian missionaries descended on the reservations and erected churches. Children were forcibly taken from their families and sent to Christian boarding schools. Many were not allowed to return home for the summer, but were sent to live with white families.

  “The Indians must conform to the white man’s ways . . . ” Thomas J. Morgan, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, said in 1889. “The tribal relations should be broke up, socialism destroyed, and the family and autonomy of the individual substituted.”19

  A visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, located on the Mall in Washington, D.C., makes our nation’s willful forgetting painfully evident. I walked through the museum and thought its closest parallel in fiction was George Orwell’s memory hole in the novel 1984, housed in a cubicle at the Ministry of Truth. In that ministry, newspapers, government documents, and reports that chronicled or detailed unpleasant or inconvenient truths were stuffed into a chute and incinerated. “Who controls the past controls the future,” says party leader O’Brien in the novel. “Who controls the present controls the past.”20

  The museum makes no mention of the genocide, starvation, burning of Indian villages, rape, or forced death marches such as the 1838 Trail of Tears, which resulted in the death of most of the Cherokee population. Vague euphemisms gloss over the suffering of Native Americans on government reservations and in Indian boarding schools. A video on the third floor equates Indian “suffering,” which is never specified, with a storm or natural disaster:

  The storm is powerful and unceasing. It creates and destroys. It offers life and death, hope and despair. It is never simply one thing. The storm is an opportunity. The storm teaches. We have learned much.21

  The museum skims over some four hundred treaties Washington signed and then violated as it appropriated two billion acres of Indian land. And there is no mention of the series of brutal government massacres of unarmed women, children, and the elderly, including the December 1890 slaughter at Wounded Knee, near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The museum fails to explain that by 1889 the buffalo population of North America had been reduced to one thousand from more than fifty million in 1830, wiping out the primary food source for the western Indian tribes and reducing them to beggars. And it ignores the heroic resistance of Indian leaders such as Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Crazy Horse.

  The museum has the audacity to display, in large black letters on a glass case of copies of old treaties, an 1829 quote from President Andrew Jackson, one of the country’s most fervent proponents of the extermination of Indians:

  Your Father [the term denoting the U.S. president] has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it. There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours forever.22

  Pine Ridge, the vast and impoverished residue of the Indian Wars in South Dakota, is a monument to a defeated ethic. The reservation, known colloquially as “the rez,” is crisscrossed with long, solitary roads that undulate up and down over the rolling hills of the prairie. We drive for hours and see only a few cars, most of which clock speeds well over seventy miles an hour. The roads pass marooned trailers, often with junk cars and discarded appliances out front, and sweep into dusty and forlorn towns, including Pine Ridge itself, and then out again into the vast expanse of grasslands. The open plains, the absence of commercial activity, including billboards, the silence that surrounds us when we stop at the crest of the Badlands, gives to Pine Ridge a stillness. Violence does not oppress you on every street corner. It does not stare out at you in the menacing looks of hustlers, pimps, drug dealers, and cops. On the rez there is much death and violence, but they come upon you like a lightning bolt. They devour their victims in fiery car wrecks, in barroom brawls, in suicides, in random shootings, and in overdoses set against a backdrop of wind, sweeping vistas, hills, and grasslands.

  Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota.

  Charlie Abourezk, a lawyer and the son of former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, takes three days off from his law prac
tice in Rapid City to take us around Pine Ridge. Charlie, a large, affable man with a moustache and greying hair, has spent his life fighting for Indian rights. He stayed in Washington for one high-school semester when his father was elected senator—and then hitchhiked home to South Dakota. A year later, he moved into a log house on Pine Ridge among Crazy Horse’s clan, few of whom spoke English, and immersed himself in the Lakota language, which he now speaks fluently. He also attended the Oglala Lakota College as an undergraduate student. He was involved in the struggle for civil and human rights of traditional tribal members on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and worked with them, sometimes alongside members of the American Indian Movement (AIM). During the violent civil conflict in the 1970s between then-tribal chairman Dick Wilson’s rogue paramilitary force known as GOONs—Guardians of the Oglala Nation—who traveled the reservation in armed caravans and were charged by critics with frequent beatings, shootings and killings, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) police on one side, and traditional people and members of AIM on the other, Charlie survived one of a series of goon squad shootings on January 31, 1976. They had come to the village where Charlie resided because people there had been active in the election campaign against Wilson. A series of shootings over the previous twenty-four hours had claimed the life of Charlie’s close friend Byron DeSersa, great-grandson of the spiritual leader Black Elk. A year later, Charlie married DeSersa’s widow, Lloydelle Big Crow, and raised DeSersa’s two children.

  Life on Pine Ridge, he says, has become steadily bleaker and more difficult.

  “The vast majority of Indian tribes and tribal members are extremely vulnerable, both to the dissolution of government—upon which they have largely been forced to depend—as well as the tremendous disparities in income and resulting joblessness,” he says:

  This has essentially dried up the ability to leave the reservation to work in order to be able to support families back home, who suffer from extreme poverty and unemployment that hovers between seventy and eighty percent. I think it is more true this year than at any time in the past that tribal members are literally going to the government-funded Indian Health Service to die with greater frequency. [Such services] are, even by the government’s admission, underfunded by about fifty percent. A recent example is Delle Big Crow, the mother of my children, who was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in July, and who was referred by her IHS physician to a non-IHS cardiologist, but as of September, she had been denied the referral three times because IHS was “out of money.” She died in the Pine Ridge Indian Health Service Hospital ER in September [2011] at age fifty-five. She is of no greater or lesser importance than the multitude of others of whom I have heard who have died at the hands of an underfunded IHS this year. The callousness of the wealthy and their servants in Congress sickens me. The most vulnerable have no voice. They simply suffer or die without a whimper.

  The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, also known as The Pine Ridge Agency, or Wazí Aháŋhaŋ Oyáŋke in Lakota, was established in 1889 in the southwest corner of South Dakota for the Oglala Sioux after Washington broke up the Great Sioux Reservation. The federal government gave nine million acres of Sioux land to the newly formed states of North Dakota and South Dakota.23 Pine Ridge, one of six reservations left within the old boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation, is the eighth largest reservation in the United States, larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.24 Population estimates on the reservation run from twenty-eight thousand to forty thousand.25 In addition to the high unemployment, forty-nine percent of those on the reservation live below the poverty level, a figure that rises to sixty-one percent for all those under the age of eighteen.26 The infant mortality rate is five times the national average. The teen suicide average is four times the national average.27 At any given moment at least forty percent of the dwellings, including sod huts that can hold as many as a dozen people, lack electricity or running water.28

  We stand one afternoon with Ivis Long Visitor, Jr., outside his sod hut a few miles southeast of Oglala. The hut is on a dirt track, marked by puddles, ruts, and craters about a mile from Highway 18. He is wearing a red baseball cap that reads “Native Pride” and a 2009 South Dakota State Cross-Country T-shirt. His daughter ran briefly for the team. He lives on the property of his grandparents, Harry and Cecelia Jumping Bull, who are now deceased. It was here that a 1975 shoot-out between Indian activists in AIM and two FBI agents left the agents and one Indian activist dead. One of the agents, Ronald A. Williams, appeared to have been killed in the shoot-out itself. The other, Jack R. Coler, incapacitated from earlier bullet wounds, appeared to have been shot twice in the head execution-style. Three AIM members were indicted for their deaths. Two were acquitted. The third, Leonard Peltier, who fled to Canada and was deported to stand trial, was convicted despite glaring irregularities and inconsistencies in the federal case against him.29 He is still in prison.

  Ivis Long Visitor, Jr., in front of his hut, on the property where two FBI agents were killed in a shootout with AIM members in 1975.

  Long Visitor, like many who live on the rez, has no running water. He uses a pump and outhouse. He recently lost his job with a moving company and is out of work.

  “The other guys I worked with were white,” he says. “We used to move people who lived up in the hills. They always watched me touch their stuff, all these doctors and people like that. They wanted to make sure I didn’t damage anything.”

  Long Visitor survives on food stamps and welfare. He does not own a car. Outside his shack are piles of old beer cans.

  “The electricity is in my dad’s name,” he says, “and since he has $25 credit a month, they haven’t turned if off yet. We used to have a lot of cows. Now there are only ten left.”

  The Merrival buffalo farm.

  Pine Ridge has vast tracts of open land, although only eighty-four thousand acres are suitable for agriculture, so much of the reservation’s prairie is leased out to white or mixed-blood cattle ranchers. The reservation includes Shannon County (where the per capita income is $7,880, making it the second poorest county in the United States), the southern half of Jackson County, and the northwest portion of Bennet County.30 There are 3,143 counties in the United States. The three on Pine Ridge are consistently ranked among the most impoverished in the nation.31

  Darrin Merrival, forty-five, a Marine Corps veteran and high-school teacher, takes us in his truck one afternoon out to his small herd of buffalo. The buffalo herds once ranged into Canada’s northwest and as far south as the Mexican states of Durango and Nuevo León. By the end of the nineteenth century, the American buffalo was close to extinction. Merrival said his father started the herd to make money, but after two white buffalo calves were born, an animal sacred in the Lakota religion, “he began to think of wealth in a different way.”

  “It was like seeing Jesus in the manger for Europeans,” he says of the calves.

  The rolling prairie includes within it the stark and majestic rock formations of the Badlands, one of the most fossil-rich areas in the United States.32 The land mass in South Dakota was once covered by an ancient sea. Outlines of fish and other aquatic creatures lie encased in the layers of rock. Lone trailers, sod huts, and crude shacks sit isolated amid the severe landscape, linked to the main road by winding dirt tracks.

  Joe, Thomas, and I are traveling this morning into Pine Ridge from Rapid City with Michael Red Cloud, thirty-three, who works at Charlie Abourezk’s law firm. He is not long out of prison on drug charges and is finishing his degree in social work at one of the tribal colleges. As we head down a long, desolate road cutting through the heart of the Badlands, Red Cloud suggests we turn off the asphalt road and onto a rugged dirt track that winds its way up to the top of Sheep Mountain.

  “It’s a great view,” he says.

  We turn right and soon kick up clouds of dust. The Toyota Highlander rocks back and forth on the uneven surface. We slow down to a crawl and climb from the valley floor to the 3,
106-foot summit of Sheep Mountain. We park at the top. The four of us, under the sweltering sun, sit on boulders on the flat surface of the peak. The 360-degree vista is dramatic. Stunted yucca and juniper trees surround us. A few feet away, the sheer rock face falls abruptly a couple of hundred feet. Flat-topped plateaus, including islands of faint green prairie grass, and arid gorges twist and undulate outward into canyons, peaked by these narrow spires and sharply eroded buttes. The rock formations and razorback pinnacles, once part of the ancient seabed, date from the late Cretaceous, Eocene, and Oligocene epochs. It was into the Badlands, following the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where at least one hundred and fifty men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux were killed and fifty-one wounded, that the last bands of Sioux warriors fled before finally surrendering, at the urging of Mike’s ancestor Chief Red Cloud, to the U.S. Army.33 The Sioux gave the vast rock formations their name mako, which means “land,” and sica, which means “bad.”

  It is here, according to Lakota mythology, that the world will end. Somewhere in the Badlands, the myth goes, is a secret cave, not far from where the prairie and the Badlands meet. This cave is home to an ancient seamstress who for hundreds of years has been working on a blanket strip of dyed porcupine quills for her buffalo robe. Beside her is her huge, black dog, Shunka Sapa. The woman and the giant dog sit next to a roaring fire lit more than a thousand years ago. The fire warms an earthen pot of wojapi, or berry soup. When the woman gets up to stir the soup, Shunka Sapa surreptitiously pulls the porcupine quills out of the blanket strip. Her work, like Penelope’s nocturnal unweaving of the burial shroud in Homer’s Odyssey, remains forever uncompleted. If the seamstress is ever permitted to finish her work, according to the legend, the world will vanish.34