Eating Fire, Tasting Blood: An Anthology of the American Indian Holocaust (review)

This is a grueling book to read for any Native person of Turtle Island who knows something about how it went with Native People and those who came. Those of us who study these matters know some of the substance discussed by various Native authors in the book, but still it is punishing to read about it in prose and in poetry. So why should we read such difficult stuff?

“Written history,” the editor says in the introduction, “makes us more aware of the silenced truths concerning past and current deceit, theft, abuse, annoyance, decimation, murder, and racism toward our ancestors and ourselves. Eating fire, tasting blood—what does this imply? Eating the fire of the Indian holocaust, tasting the blood of truth. Of course, this is a painful venture, but many of us want these truths revealed; we want the silence broken” (xi). Helpful to me in reading about these difficult matters was when I juxtaposed Eduardo Duran’s Healing the Soul Wound: Counseling with American Indians and Other Native Peoples (2006) with this work. Duran speaks to the historical trauma or holocaust, noting its base for the soul wound, and mentions “research examining historical trauma,” indicating in a quote that “the ‘holocaust’ is not over for many American Indian people. It continues to affect their perceptions on a daily basis and impinges on their psychological and physical health” (17). He suggests obtaining knowledge about this history, as “systematic genocide was inflicted on many of the Original People of this hemisphere” (7).

This book is sectioned into reasonable and helpful areas or six sections, with the first section dealing with the issues of manifest destiny, or, as the subtitle states, “greed disguised as God.” Vine Deloria ends that section with an interesting yet scalding summary entitled “Indian Affairs,” which ends somewhat somberly by noting that the Indians and the whites “were somehow destined to be each other’s victims” (62).

The section on sacred rites brings out several ways of looking at things from both the Christian and the traditional spiritual way of Indian people. Matthew Gilbert talks about Christianity at Sherman Institute, and Moore discusses “remembering on First Mesa.” She discusses what spirituality really means to American Indians and how necessary ceremony is for Indians to retain balance with the earth, that we are all connected, one to another, all living things. This section is especially helpful as it provides a balance as one reads and thinks about the carnage specifics discussed throughout the sections.

The section labeled “Propaganda (Exposure and Surveillance)” has very helpful pieces within it to understand the gist of this work on the American Indian holocaust or experience with the coming of the white man. Don Birch-field’s piece, entitled “Choctaw Legacy: How to Lose Your Country Twice in Fourteen Treaties,” although difficult to read relative to the incredible losses suffered by the Choctaws as the first to travel the Trail of Tears, losing one out of every seven human beings, provides a listing of six “callous and duplicitous” things that today’s Americans need to think about relative to the Choctaw experience. His footnotes are excellent, especially note 2 on the doctrine of discovery, which he says is a doctrine of religious bias (124). Vest’s piece within the same section discusses the fate of the Eastern Tribes. I suppose we tend to think we know lots about what happened to the people of the East because they were among the first to meet the people who came here to Turtle Island. Read what Vest has to say and realize that we hardly know anything of substance. Vest’s discussion of Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, which was applied to American Indians (150), gives one pause, perhaps even to ponder as to how or why the Academy needs to require American Indian studies to augment information students receive in their Western civilization...