The Killing Fields of Wounded Knee

Jeffrey Ostler. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xviii + 387 pp. Photographs, illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $21.99 (paper).

On December 29, 1890, as many as 300 Sioux were killed or mortally wounded by U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee creek. After a winter blizzard spread a white blanket over the bloody mud, Dr. Charles Eastman, a full-blooded Santee Sioux physician, attempted to rescue possible survivors on New Year's Day. Beneath a mound of snow, he uncovered a little girl about four years of age lying next to a corpse. Her name was Zintkala Nuni, or Lost Bird. She was wrapped in a shawl and wore a buckskin cap, which bore traditional beadwork crafted into the design of an American flag. Despite mild frostbite, she was still alive. Brigadier General Leonard W. Colby, commander of the Nebraska militia, eventually adopted the orphan and gave her the name Marguerite.¹

More than one hundred years later, historians continue to ask: what happened at Wounded Knee? Jeffrey Ostler, professor of history and department head at the University of Oregon, turns his gaze toward the killing fields to find answers. He seeks to revise the classic narrative of Robert M. Utley's The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963), which called it "a regrettable, tragic accident of war . . . for which neither side as a whole may be properly condemned."² Dissatisfied with existing scholarship, Ostler revisits a rich cache of documents in the National Archives as well as an impressive number of secondary sources. He untangles a contested process negotiated through a century of "empire" building. Instead of the "last Indian war," he sees America's legacies of conquest.

Ostler argues that America's commitment to an expansionist ideology of manifest destiny ultimately led to Wounded Knee. His story arc resembles Dee Brown's best-selling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), although his approach to the subject is more analytical.³ He engages in the kind of analysis typical of New Western historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick, who once called the frontier the "f-word."⁴ Likewise, he prefers the "c-word," conquest, and uses it as the title for the first part of his narrative. During the nineteenth century, U.S. imperialism and colonialism prominently featured armed forces. Rather than spreading peace, justice, freedom, or democracy across North America, he contends, they constituted a weapon of massive destruction. Although he concedes that no one deliberately planned to massacre the Plains Sioux, he finds that the "reliance on overwhelming military power to intimidate and coerce had exactly that result" (p. 9). What ended at Wounded Knee began with Lewis and Clark, or so Ostler argues.

Starting with the expedition of Lewis and Clark, Ostler sketches the designs of a democratic republic to erect an "empire of liberty" in occupied territories. He gives passing attention to the "winning of the West" by an alliance of Sioux bands, who drove the Cheyenne, the Kiowa, the Crow, and the Pawnee away from their homelands.⁵ While mindful of the Seven Council Fires of the Plains Sioux, he provides limited coverage of the close encounters between Indian people and the "Jeffersonian trespassers." He truncates the game of geopolitics played by Sioux leaders, saying little about their strategic adaptations to the spread of cholera, measles, smallpox, horses, alcohol, and firearms. His account dispenses with the Lewis and Clark expedition in two pages and swiftly closes chapter one with forward-looking statements on "a history and future of intentional acts of genocide and ethnocide" (p. 39). Given the title of his book, readers may be disappointed by the sparse information in the narrative about what the Corps of Discovery actually did.

The plot of Ostler's narrative thickens during the 1850s, when the negotiations for treaties between the United States and the Plains Sioux began. From...