{"id":36041,"date":"2023-03-06T07:05:09","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T15:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/?p=36041"},"modified":"2023-03-13T10:43:56","modified_gmt":"2023-03-13T17:43:56","slug":"vanishing-indians-and-wounded-knee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2023\/03\/vanishing-indians-and-wounded-knee\/","title":{"rendered":"Vanishing Indians and Wounded Knee"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a new history book that is rattling across the best seller lists. It\u2019s a collection of essays called Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past<\/strong><\/em>. There are 20 chapters on everything from \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism\u201d to the \u201cNew Deal\u201d and the \u201cSouthern Strategy.\u201d The third chapter is \u201cVanishing Indians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, those of us who know even a little about efforts to revive language and culture among tribes, who follow the news about boarding schools and the Dakota Access Pipeline, know that Indians\u2014Native Americans\u2014have not vanished. We might know Edward Sheriff Curtis\u2019s famous photo of the horseback Navajo moving away in the distance: \u201cVanishing Race.\u201d We know about Carlisle Indian Boarding School founder Pratt\u2019s dictum to \u201cKill the Indian in him, and save the man.\u201d And we are now following stories of Native Revival after decades\u2014centuries\u2014of attempts to assimilate and\/or kill Indians, to make them disappear.<\/p>\n

I knew this much when I began reading Ari Kelman\u2019s chapter in the new book. What I hadn\u2019t considered was that Dee Brown\u2019s epochal Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee<\/strong><\/em> was a verse in the vanishing Indian song. What we knew was that Brown chronicled the atrocities, the broken treaties and broken promises the settler economy of the expanding United States brought on the indigenous peoples of the land.<\/p>\n

What hadn\u2019t occurred to me was that Brown basically ended his story in 1890 at Wounded Knee\u2014with the last and one of the most poignant instances of mistreatment. Good for Brown for bringing all of the misdeeds to our attention. Not so good in discounting or ignoring the Indians of his time\u2014the book was first published in 1971. According to Kelman, Brown searched diligently through the record books for white testimony about those misdeeds, but did not talk with Indians. For that reason, he did not get the story of Native resilience that was happening under his nose.<\/p>\n

Kelman mentions one Native writer who has taken the vanishing myth on directly. David Treuer and his The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present. In his 2019 New Yorker<\/strong><\/em> review of Treuer\u2019s book, Ned Blackhawk says of Brown\u2019s Wounded Knee:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The problem was that in place of Indian vilification Brown offered victimization. Despite their nobility and fortitude, he suggested, Indians were still defeated. In his telling, Native history became a slow, inexorable decline toward disappearance.<\/p>\n

Treuer, on the other hand, chronicles what Indians were working against\u2014assimilation and disappearance–while he celebrates activism and resistance, from Native US war heroes in both World Wars through the relocation and termination programs of the 50s and 60s to current language programs and reservation colleges. (Did you know that the movie, \u201cStar Wars,\u201d was dubbed into Dine for tribal viewing!)<\/p>\n

Kelman does not mention Phil Deloria, but he should have. Deloria, the first Native American in the history department at Harvard, published Indians in Unexpected Places<\/em><\/strong> in 2004. His research shows a pervasive twentieth century presence of Native Americans in movies, advertising\u2014think Pontiac cars and Land O\u2019Lakes butter\u2014and even classical music.<\/p>\n

We should, following Treuer and Deloria, remember Wounded Knee, but we should not see it as the signal of Vanishing Indians.<\/p>\n

# # #<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a new history book that is rattling across the best seller lists. It\u2019s a collection of essays called Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past. There are 20 chapters on everything from \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism\u201d to the \u201cNew Deal\u201d and the \u201cSouthern Strategy.\u201d The third chapter is \u201cVanishing Indians.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":36042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[248,1321,837,339,264,1253,707,1250,1256,591],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/library.josephy.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/51aXQ3y2wSL._SX373_BO1204203200_.jpg?fit=375%2C499&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36041"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36041"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36055,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36041\/revisions\/36055"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}