"Just some gas money...please," he whispered.
I knew he was playing on my guilt which was overpowering considering I was standing on the mass grave containing scores of Native American bodies massacred at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. But I couldn't help it. I gave him a few bucks and he went on his way with his daughter.For my entire life, I have wanted to visit this area of South Dakota. When I was a very young child, my dad would read passages from the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown to me and tell me a version of history that I had never heard. No John Wayne. No red faced savages. Just lie after lie...murder after murder...slaughter after slaughter. When we decided to take a family vacation there, we planned a day trip down to the massacre site and then back through the Badlands.
Getting to the site itself is slightly difficult. The roads in that part of the state are not clearly marked so we had to sort of guess that we were going in the right direction. The few miles leading up to Wounded Knee were massively depressing.
The site is on the Pine Ridge Reservation and as we passed through the several Native American communities on our way there, the poverty was staggering. Burned out trailers and dozens of cannibalized automobiles littered the landscape. Honestly, it looked just like the poverty one would see in a Third World country. It was awful. All four of us were pretty shook up by it.
When we got to Wounded Knee, we saw a few make shift dream catcher stands set up along with a few tourists. We made our way up to the monument and the grave to check it out. Here is what it looks like today.
Right before we walked under the cross, the man above approached me. There were a few Native Americans sort of hanging around with dream catchers to sell. As some other tourists came up, they drifted to them and my daughter and I walked around.As I was reading the names on the monument, I started to think about a long debate/argument I had with juris a while back on the incident at Waco with the Branch Davidians. In several key ways, what happened at Waco is very similar to what happened at Wounded Knee.
In both cases, the government had a complete lack of understanding of the religious aspects of each group. With Wounded Knee, it was the Ghost Dance. With Waco, it was the Seventh Day Adventist. In both cases, the government overreacted (due to this ignorance), made unforgivable mistakes, and innocent people died. In both cases there was institutionalized discrimination of religion and, in the case of Wounded Knee, race as well. L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, summed this up ugliness up quite nicely when he wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer:
The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.
This particular quote reminds me quite a bit of the illegal immigrant diatribes we hear from the Cult Tribe these days but that's a topic for another day.
The juxtaposition of Wounded Knee and Waco does reveal stark differences however. In addition to the racism we see above, Wounded Knee was also the culmination of an extermination of the indigenous people of the North American continent. Americans at the time believed it was their Manifest Destiny to take this land. Sadly, this is all too similar to other periods of time and leaders who have justified wholesale massacre of people.
And there certainly weren't any widespread allegations of child abuse as there were with Waco. The Native Americans at Wounded Knee were animists and didn't have a central figure like David Koresh at whom they heaped psychotic worship upon.
Yet, the similarities between Waco and Wounded Knee can't be ignored. Of course, this doesn't mean that I'm going to go all Tea Bagger on all of you and hate the "Gubmint" but we do need to examine why this continues to happen. There is a decided leap to instant fear by people in this country to hate what they do not understand and act irrationally. This is true regardless of your political stripes. Because we are the government, they become the mechanism for this fear and the results are often tragic...as they were four days after Christmas one hundred and twenty years ago.
6 comments:
The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth.
This particular quote reminds me quite a bit of the illegal immigrant diatribes we hear from the Cult Tribe these days...
So let's get this straight. You're equating expecting immigrants to carry ID as such, and treating people who break the law as lawbreakers, to deliberate genocide?
...but that's a topic for another day.
Yeah right. Don't expect anyone to defend such an asinine statement, just accept it as true.
Horse apples.
I get it if you don't, CWR. It reminds him of the same rhetoric that we hear from people like John McCain who essentially lie about Mexican gangs roving the border and killing white people even though the facts are that violence has gone down in the border states.
Reminds, not equates.
Those at Wounded Knee were about as great a threat to their neighbors as were the Davidians. The difference was that the people of this country in general supported the destruction of Native American culture/life, whereas no one in Texas was all that concerned with the Davidians. Just some bureaucrats in DC. And you are still more sympathetic to the Indians.
Also, it is odd that you feel more remorse for what the govt did long ago - in a culture far removed from today, then shock over the utterly un-necessary treatment of some recent religious wackos. Remember, we are supposed to be more enlightened NOW.
As to child-abuse, need I remind you that the govt used to forcibly take Native American children from their homes and 'educate' them (by denying them access to their families and culture).
The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians.
"The American people have declared that our only safety depends on requiring 'Mexican-looking' people to obey the law just like everybody else."
Okay, so far I see the similarity.
Now explain to me how expecting them to obey the law reminds you of how "Mexican looking people" have been wronged by us for however long, and how (shock!) expecting them to obey the law is just the culmination of a string of injustices.
It's not race that's the problem, except on your side. Conservatives think everyone should have to obey the law, regardless of what color they are. You guys think expecting anyone (except white conservatives, of course) to obey the law is racist.
...from people like John McCain who essentially lie...
And yet when Obama actually lied all the way through the health care debate, somehow I missed your bitching about how unacceptable that all was. I wonder why that is?
I knew he was playing on my guilt which was overpowering considering I was standing on the mass grave containing scores of Native American bodies massacred at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890.
This is part of what makes me wonder about you. If I assume you are less than 140 years old or so, I think I can safely bet you didn't kill them, didn't approve of it, and certainly didn't authorize it. In fact, I think it's probably unlikely that you had more than one of your four grandparents involved with it at all, if even that.
So if your guilt is "overpowering" because of this, do you think "white people" should feel guilty about the Roman invasions of Britain, the north African coast, etc.? Should we feel guilty about the Holocaust because Hitler was a white person? Should we feel guilty about the Napoleonic Wars because Bonaparte was a white person?
Hell, I don't even feel guilty about William Ayers planning for the deaths of 20 to 25 million of his own countrymen, and that happened during my lifetime.
Do you believe I should?
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