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VIOLENCE OVER THE LAND: INDIANS AND EMPIRES IN THE EARLY AMERICAN WEST. Ned Blackhawk 372 pages, paperback: $17.95. Harvard University Press, 2008. -
GALL: LAKOTA WAR CHIEF. Robert W. Larson 302 pages, hardcover: $24.95. University of Oklahoma Press, 2007 -
CRAZY HORSE:A LAKOTA LIFE. Kingsley M. Bray 510 pages, hardcover: $34.95. University of Oklahoma Press, 2006
“Indians must either fall in with the march of
civilization and progress,” wrote Major James McLaughlin, military
director of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, in 1889, “or be
crushed by the passage of the multitude.”
More than a
century later, three writers uncomfortably assess that prediction,
and find that Native Americans have indeed fallen into step with
the settlers’ violent march toward “progress.” In Violence
over the Land, Ned Blackhawk, a professor of history and
American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, explores
the thesis that “violence and American nationhood progressed hand
in hand” and that our historical narrative has “failed to gauge the
violence that re-made much of the continent before U.S. expansion.”
Blackhawk, whose book won three awards from historical
and literary associations, joins the authors of Crazy
Horse: A Lakota Life and Gall: Lakota War
Chief in contending that violence remains the ethos of
the United States, and that Americans – both indigenous and
settlers – have long been steeped in the bloody tradition of war as
the primary means of resolving territorial conflict. In these three
books, as in the epics of Homer and Virgil, “civilization” advances
its insistent course through battles too numerous to mention and
“heroes” whose deeds consists of ever-mounting murder tolls.
“Come on! Die with me! It’s a good day to die! Cowards to
the rear!” called Crazy Horse to his comrades on the day Custer
would die at the Battle of Little Bighorn. In both Crazy
Horse and Gall, valor remains the
preserve of men, calibrated in warrior’s terms by observers and
biographers alike.
Long before European settlement, Sioux
warred with Crow, Dakota with Chippewa, and more than one
Southwestern tribe regularly enslaved captives – not unlike the
ancient Greeks, who inspired present-day democracy. The slave trade
was a well-established business in what we now call New Mexico well
before the Spaniards joined in the profiteering.
Of the three authors, only Blackhawk
questions the role violence played in tribal conflicts. Biographers
Kingsley Bray, a British researcher, and Robert Larson, a retired
professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado, betray
a romantic admiration for their subjects.
Crazy Horse won
multiple victories in wars against soldiers, especially the battles
of Little Bighorn and Powder River, and Bray clearly esteems his
subject’s military prowess: “By the mid-1860s, the Crow war had
seen Crazy Horse rise among his people to a revered status as an
inspirational warrior. Courageous yet never foolhardy, he had
completed the rehabilitation of his family name.”
Crazy
Horse was also a spiritual leader, but it is his warrior status
that made him famous. His practice of bloody revenge is never
called into question in this “Lakota life.”
Gall – known
as the “Fighting Cock of the Sioux” by U.S. troops – is unfamiliar
to many. Although he fought at the Battle at Little Bighorn, along
with his mentor, Sitting Bull, Gall was literally omitted from
history: Fellow Sioux Kicking Bull deliberately left him out of the
pictograph he made to commemorate the victory over Custer. The
omission was meant to criticize Gall for his capitulation to white
leadership, but his biographer considers him a pragmatist: “Gall
apparently did believe that cooperation with the authorities at
Standing Rock was the best way to advance the welfare of his
people.”
Gall joined Sitting Bull in the exodus to
Canada, then returned to a North Dakota reservation where he
converted to Christianity and took on the government-assigned role
of farmer. In a grim harbinger of the future of many reservation
Indians in the decades ahead, he died at 54 of complications from
obesity.
Does Gall’s absence from
contemporary adulation of Native American leaders result from his
acceptance of the reservation’s inevitability? He does not go down
fighting, like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Flattering chroniclers
of these better-known warrior chiefs seem to unquestioningly equate
valor and violence.
“Nothing happened,” wrote one Spanish
trader upon entering a Paiute village, recorded in Blackhawk’s
Violence over the Land, “for these Indians are
gentle and cowardly.” The Spaniards found these Paiutes ripe for
enslaving, and did so. “Gentle and cowardly,” a phrase which might
describe the nearly absent women of these volumes, leads to a
painful conclusion: Nonviolent people are easily conquered.
These histories can’t help but seem ominous in a world
brimming over with conflict. Similarities to tribal conflicts in
Afghanistan and clashing religious sects in Iraq relentlessly
present themselves as battle succeeds battle, vengeance begets
vengeance, ad nauseum. Even today’s suicide bombers are presaged in
the 19th century. “A group of poorly armed young Lakota and
Cheyenne warriors … called the Suicide Boys” made a pact the
night before Custer’s Last Stand; all were left “dead or dying by
the end of the fray,” writes Larson.
Readers looking for
a non-violent solution to present-day problems won’t find any
inspiration in these histories. Nineteenth-century American writer
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in “Young Goodman Brown,” his parable
about righteous Christian colonists committing various evils,
including the killing of indigenous peoples, “Welcome, my children,
to the communion of your race.”
The author of
Lily in the Desert: Stories, will publish a new story collection,
And Darkness Was Under His Feet, this
year.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Die with me.
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