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Historical revisionists of American Indian history portray indigenous people being as violent as white Europeans were before they arrived on this continent and after settlement. Consequently, HBO’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” was no exception in the scene with Sitting Bull and Col Nelson Miles on the Buffalo Robe, as Miles justified the genocide he was committing as “You were as violent as we are, we’re doing the same thing to you that you did to them (paraphrasing).”
Crossposted at Native American Netroots
Miles challenges Sitting Bull’s account of the Lakota people as champions of the plains. “The proposition that you were a peaceable people before the appearance of the white man is the most fanciful legend of all. You conquered those tribes, lusting for their game and their lands, just as we have now conquered you for no less noble a cause.” Sitting Bull exclaims, “This is your story of my people!” Miles responds, “This is the truth, not legend.”
This is the truth, not historical revisionism. There are general and specific reasons why Sitting Bull was right. To get the answers as to why, we turn to the scholarship of James Demeo. First, we’ll look at his conclusions to get the general overview.
Conclusions
This evidence, drawn from history, archeology, and anthropology, speaks clearly: The New World prior to Columbus was a far less violent place than the Old World. And it can be argued that, in spite of many terrible events which followed after Columbus, the New World remained a less violent place all the way down through the centuries because of its geographical isolation from the more violent Saharasian empires…This summary suggests the general vindication of the vast majority of Native American values and peoples as standing on the peace – making side of history. Certainly, not all Indigenous American cultures fit the peaceful images given in Dances with Wolves, but it is not an exaggeration to say that the majority did.
To go to the specifics, we’ll go to page 148 of his essay under the heading “Archeological Evaluations.” This is number 3 of a list of 9 in which other listings are of Michigan, Illinois, and Southern California to list three of them.
3. South Dakota, Crow Creek, c. 1300 C.E. Site of a tribal massacre of around 500 men, women, and children, but with a deficit of reproductive – age females.15
At least fifty Middle Plains Woodland skeletons and the Crow Creek massacre mass burial bones have been examined. A few Siouan skeletons from various places have been evaluated. A significant number of bones came from skeletons for which there was little or no provenience. The oldest human remnants we have seen from South Dakota (carbon dated 3,800 BP +/- 110 years) were 16 incomplete skeletons from the Hilde Gravel Pit near Lake Madison (161,162). The Middle Plains Woodland skeletons, the Crow Creek villagers (probably proto-Arikara) (361) and the Hilde Gravel Pit skeletons are pre-Columbian; those in museums, private collections, and salvage archaeology skeletons are primarily post-Columbian.
Who Carried Out the Massacre and Why?:
We cannot know for certain. Several explanations are possible. One is that it was some outside group, perhaps displaced Middle Missouri villagers from the north. Another suggests that some distant group from the east or west came through the area and massacred the villagers. Though neither can be ruled out, some problems suggest that it would have been difficult to do due to villages size, protection, and the fact that relatives lived in villages nearby.Another explanation suggests that overpopulation combined with climatic instability caused competition for arable land. The massacre may have been carried out by one or several allied villages of the same culture. Evidence of malnutrition in the paleopathology suggests part of the hypothesis could be true. Computer simulation suggests that the hypothesis is feasible.
So, the only possible evidence, simply because of its location, does not at all justify “You conquered those tribes, lusting for their game and their lands, just as we have now conquered you for no less noble a cause.”
In addition, just above the “Archeological Evaluations” is stated:
Even the most aggressive and warlike of the Native American empire – building cultures (i. e., the Aztecs) never came close to the systematic murder and destruction seen at the hands of various Saharasian butcher – kings (e. g., Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse – Dung, Pol Pot, ect.). In fact, the overwhelming percentage of New World Peoples, even after all the trauma and destruction which followed Columbus, maintained significant elements of their peace – oriented matristic cultures, all the way into the 1800’s.
Dick Wolf states in the 2007 edition of Cowboys and Indians about the movie, “The reason Law & Order has been on for 17 years is that it tries to point out on a weekly basis that the world is in shades of gray.” Perhaps this is why a friend of mine thought Col Miles was right: Wolf’s innovative use of “gray.” Never does Wolf use his “shades of gray” to distort the moral line when it pertains to rape, murder, or theft. A rapist, a murderer, and a thief are always clearly on the wrong side of the law. Never have I heard an officer say, “She deserved it, they had it coming, or they shouldn’t leave their stuff lying around where someone can steal it.” To the contrary, his “shades of gray” that I have seen in Law & Order pertain to trying the case, where after the trial the one clearly on the wrong side of the law may go free as a result of politics or loopholes in legislation. Why Wolf didn’t do the same with Sitting Bull and Col Miles in the movie I don’t know, but I do know this – Sitting Bull was right. And, there are no “shades of gray” when it’s about genocide.
To conclude, there’s nothing like a protest to bring these racists’ and revisionists’ ideas out in the open. BTW, the sign that I saw said “Dawes Commission + land run = Genocide
(wasn’t mine, but that’s what it said).”
Notice the framing the commenter uses, not knowing that “the vast majority of Native American values and peoples (are on) as standing on the peace – making side of history,” and what an excuse it makes for them to be racist.
(video and definition added)
‘We’re part of Oklahoma history’Jubilation and outrage marked festivities at an American Indian parade Saturday in downtown Oklahoma City.
The Society to Preserve Indigenous Rights and Indigenous Traditions hosted the parade, which kicked off about 9 a.m. at the corner of Reno and S Hudson avenues.
– snip –
Others walked the length of the parade carrying handmade signs bearing slogans such as “Frybread Power” and “Dawes Commission + land run = organized theft.”
(The youth in the beginning are stickball players, which is an ancient game that southeastern American Indians called the “little brother to war.” Requiring many of the same skills and rituals as war, stickball historically settled disputes between towns and sometimes between tribes.)
(from comments)
“You were here FIRST and they RAN over you,” is CUTE, plus it’s clever revisionist history. Wouldn’t it be closer to the truth to say someone was here before the current Indian residents and the current Indian residents either knocked politely on their doors and requested entrance or the current Indian residents trampled, beat, stole, pillaged, razed, shackled and raped them to get THEIRS? Will we get that depiction in your revised history of the American Indian? When the “Great White Father in Washington” moved you from your homelands in Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, etc., and “gave” you land in Oklahoma, didn’t someone else have to be moved off YOUR new land? Will your “true” depiction incorporate what happened to those the current Indidan residents displaced? So much for INDIGENOUS. DOUBLED. You also bought and sold other human beings the way you buy and sell “frybread.” Power up that depiction in your history of the American Indian, o truth seekers.
I’ll say it again, Sitting Bull was right.
“The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.”
[Update]:
What I didn’t put in, but after debates confronting denial I want to add it now.
I thought this about that scene then and I still think it now.
Nobody of sound mind would ever knowingly take the words of a Holocaust Overseer as credible. Yet, because of historical revisionism I suppose, one of my friends, ignorant of this history, saw the scene first mentioned and thought Col Miles was right. Here’s generally why I’m calling Col Miles a Holocaust Overseer.
White officials became alarmed at the religious fervor and activism and in December 1890 banned the Ghost Dance on Lakota reservations. When the rites continued, officials called in troops to Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota. The military, led by veteran General Nelson Miles, geared itself for another campaign.
– snip –
General Miles had also ordered the arrest of Big Foot, who had been known to live along the Cheyenne River in South Dakota. But, Big Foot and his followers had already departed south to Pine Ridge, asked there by Red Cloud and other supporters of the whites, in an effort to bring tranquility. Miles sent out the infamous Seventh Calvary led by Major Whitside to locate the renegades. They scoured the Badlands and finally found the Miniconjou dancers on Porcupine Creek, 30 miles east of Pine Ridge. The Indians offered no resistance.
Suppression of religion, and this as well.
117th Anniversary of the Wounded Knee MassacreThe first intention of the U.S. Army in part was to detain Chief Big Foot under the pretext that he was a “fomenter of disturbance,” remembering that Native Americans did not have equal rights at that time in the Constitution.
In addition, the real intention was doing a “roundup” to a military prison camp, which would have become an internment and concentration camp in Omaha after they were prisoners. Colonel James W. Forsyth had orders to force them into going there.
Making Holocaust Overseers look good, it’s nothing new.
Gregory Stanton: The Eight Stages of Genocide
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was AWESOME!!!
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In orange.
Your writings are always eye opening.
The violence & materialism of ‘European colonalism’ really has no parallel.
“The emotions of Native Americans themselves are hard to imagine. In under four centuries, disease, warfare, hunger, massacre and despair had reduced their population from an estimated 7-10 million to less than 250,000. As well as costing them their independence and and more than 90% of their land….
For the Plains nations, the extermination of their vast bison herds- by 1895 there were fewer than 1,000 animals left- had not only driven them to starvation and defeat but had destroyed the core of their spiritual and cermonial world.” James Wilson from The Earth Shall Weep.
Red Cloud signed a fradulent treaty that was later ruled by the Supreme Court to be illegal. But the rule of law never mattered. The law was a simple and grotesque facade. The government got what ever they wanted. Whenever the law got in their way they simply chose to ignore it while insisting American Indians were always to be binded to it.
Whenever I pass by rail road tracks I am constantly reminded that the backs of American Indians were broken so the tracks could be built.
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Up in Canada, there is pressure on the Canadian government and church to come clean about the native children who died at their hands and were buried in mass graves.
http://www.hiddenfromhistory.o…
Also Amensty International has an article Soul Wound – about the horrible legacy of Native American Schools.
Mentioning Canada… “A 2001 report by the Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada documents the responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church, the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the federal government in the deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the Canadian residential school system.”