Struggles Over Memory: Indigenous People and Commemorative Culture

Once the purview of southern scholars, historical studies in American memory have recently turned to regions beyond the South, relations beyond the black-white binary, and stubborn myths beyond the Lost Cause. Tiya Miles's research on African American and Cherokee relations (The House on Diamond Hill, 2010) shows us that memory is a complicated force that can articulate and shape identity; it reveals structures of power and the unstable meanings of family, race, and place. In addition to Miles's study, there has been growth in the fertile ground of Indigenous memory studies. Jean O'Brien's Firsting and Lasting (2010) and Christine DeLucia's Memory Lands (2018) argue that memories of colonial violence and settlement in New England continue to shape perceptions of dispossession and Indigenous persistence in the region. Ari Kelman's A Misplaced Massacre (2015) and a handful of others turned westward to contend with memorials of violent events that Americans lamented as the price of progress. Other recent scholars consider the fraught capitalist realm of heritage tourism, noting how the marketplace of memory can be a double-edged sword for Indigenous people. Emerging within this vibrant scholarly field, David W. Grua and Andrew Denson likewise focus on the fraught process of memory-making while centering Indigenous peoples' perspectives. Their unique studies advance new insights about the politics of memory in which Indigenous people have long been active participants, while also modeling different approaches to evidence, scope, and framing in their respective books.

Grua's Surviving Wounded Knee and Denson's Monuments to Absence set their studies in distinct regions of the United States: the Northern Plains and the South, respectively. They each engage with the memory of a violent event. They read Lakotas' and Cherokees' engagement with non-Indian memorial practices in the specific context of each tribal nation and federal Indian policy shift. They consider Indigenous history as constitutive of the American settler state, and their respective battles over the meaning of the past as fundamental struggles over the memory of the nation. Grua limits his study to the surviving generation who held the event in living memory, while Denson focuses on commemorative practices that began nearly a century afterward. These books not only provide excellent summaries of the events in question; the authors' distinct choices about how to frame and structure their analyses of what happens in the aftermath of colonial violence also raise productive questions over the definition and stakes of memory studies.

On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry engaged members of Minneconjou Lakota Chief Big Foot's band in a violent altercation. Jumpy and suspicious that the group of Ghost Dancers camped at Wounded Knee creek intended to attack them, the soldiers attempted to disarm and then fired upon the Lakota men, women, and children who fled for their lives. Almost immediately afterward, survivors insisted that the Seventh Cavalry had murdered innocent people. The survivors' quest for justice was personal, but also holds national significance. Wounded Knee is commonly understood to mark the moment when armed American Indian resistance ended and the United States secured military dominion over their lands. For Grua, this "history of ways that Wounded Knee has been remembered, contested, and reimagined during the five decades after 1890" is paramount to understanding national memory and the origins of American power borne of violence.

Surviving Wounded Knee is composed of seven mainly chronological chapters and divided into two parts: "Official Memory" and "Lakota Countermemory." The neat organization refers mainly to written text and can be a bit misleading, for it belies the complex ways in which historical narratives are constructed in various forms. Indeed, as Grua demonstrates, Lakota survivors and non-Indian critics did raise challenges to the version that became the official...