The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (review)

Not long ago I made a visit to the Museum of Wounded Knee at Wall, South Dakota, located on I-90 just north of the Badlands of South Dakota and just outside of two of the largest Sioux reservations in the Northern Plains: Pine Ridge and Rosebud. This is a new museum, put together by a well-meaning and affable white man from Colorado by the name of Steve Wyant. Entering the exhibits through a turnstile (Indians don't have to pay the $6.00), I saw a chart entitled "Political Structure of the Sioux Nation" and noticed that the Isianti and Ihanktowan were not among the Seven Council Fires of the Sioux Nation—the English name of the Oceti Shakowan normally made up of those two large tribes, along with the Oglalas, Hunkpati, Sicangu, Sihasapa, and Minneconjou. I suggested (facetiously) that the museum curator should change it to the Five Council Fires of the Sioux Nation. This is an indication, of course, of how Indian histories are made and told, changed, manipulated, and obscured.

Strolling further along the walls of the museum, I noticed another collection of pictures with the explanation: "Custer Enters the Black Hills—1874 and 1876." This "entry," of course, was several years after the Treaty of 1868 was signed by the U.S. Government and the Sioux Nation, in which it is stated that "no white man shall enter the treaty lands without the express permission of the Indians." There is no historical evidence that George A. Custer had the permission of the Sioux. I asked the museum curator to change the explanation to "Custer Invades the Black Hills in 1874 and 1876." He looked pained. But unless one understands the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, the 1876 invasion of the Black Hills by Custer and nine hundred men of the U.S. military, which brought about the Battle of the Little Big Horn and death, unless one understands the subsequent 1877 theft of the Black Hills by the U.S. Congress and eventual passage of the 1887 Allotment Act, one cannot understand the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

Jeffrey Ostler's The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee chronicles much of the history of that time and place and uses the same kind of apologetic and obfuscating language found in the Museum of Wounded Knee. On page 20, for example, he says: "The death—some would say murder—of yet another of the Lakotas' preeminent leaders deserves careful analysis." This is the way he introduces the assassination of Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa, without ever using the word assassination. Instead, Ostler suggests that the reader must understand why U.S. officials ordered the Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull in the first place (Buffalo Bill Cody had orders and volunteered to arrest him because he was dangerous), then launches into several explanations: deep animosity between the police and Sitting Bull's people, hatreds and feuds among the Indians themselves, factionalism bound up in colonialism, and, of course, the inevitable Ghost Dance. Blaming the victims and blaming religion have long been the methods by which apologetic historians account for this crime. Ostler is no exception to this rule.

An entire chapter is devoted to this kind of internecine rationale for war and death in the Indian camp in 1890. There is no mention of the Allotment Act of 1887, the breaking up of the Sioux Treaty Homelands bitterly contested by Sitting Bull, as the major reason for the political assassination of this important leader. He had to be assassinated if Indian lands were going to be occupied by whites. There is little reason to believe that religion was the major cause for the assassinations or the massacres of that period if one understands the function of colonial -intentions.

As I continue to read about the assassination of...