When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE
Native America From 1890 to the Present
By David Treuer
Illustrated. 512 pp. Riverhead Books. $28.
Native America From 1890 to the Present
By David Treuer
Illustrated. 512 pp. Riverhead Books. $28.
Over
the past 12 months, Native American politicians, artists and academics
have made uncommon gains. Indeed, Native American women helped to make
2018 the Year of the Woman. In November, New Mexican and Kansan voters
elected Debra Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk) to
Congress, while voters in Minnesota elected Peggy Flanagan (Ojibwe)
their lieutenant governor. In October, the sociologist Rebecca Sandefur
(Chickasaw) and the poet Natalie Diaz (Mojave) won MacArthur Foundation
Awards, while throughout the spring and summer, the playwrights Mary
Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee), Larissa FastHorse (Lakota) and DeLanna Studi
(Cherokee) had historic openings at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.,
Artists Repertory Theater in Portland, Ore., and Portland Center Stage,
respectively. From the cover of American Theater magazine in April to
CNN on election night, the work of these eight dynamic Native women
garnered national acclaim.
Such
achievements represent more than added texture to the mosaic of modern
America. They underscore the rising power of American Indians over the
past two generations. During an era known as “Self-Determination,”
Indian tribes and their citizens have changed not only their particular
nations but also the larger nation around them. Though still poorly
understood, this era emerged from urban and reservation activism in the
1960s and ’70s, when community leaders, students and veterans, among
others, challenged onerous policies that had aimed to assimilate tribal
communities. The Self-Determination Era has now grown in prodigious ways
and yielded countless examples of achievement across Native North
America, including the elections of Haaland and Davids as the first
American Indian women ever elected to Congress.
Advertisement
“The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee,” by David Treuer
(Ojibwe), examines these recent generations of American Indian history.
Through memoir, interviews and extensive reading, Treuer counters the
familiar narratives of invisibility that have so readily frozen
America’s indigenous peoples. Interweaving stories from family members,
the voices of policymakers and assessments of contemporary youth
culture, the book introduces alternative visions of American history.
The result is an informed, moving and kaleidoscopic portrait of “Indian
survival, resilience, adaptability, pride and place in modern life.”
Rarely has a single volume in Native American history attempted such
comprehensiveness.
CreditNisreen Breek
Image
A noted novelist, Treuer takes his title from the celebrated work “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” by Dee Brown.
Published in 1970 at the height of the activist movements, Brown’s
reassessment of the 19th-century wars between Indians and the federal
government resonated with a generation of Americans. Achieving its
narrative crescendo with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, when the
Seventh Cavalry was said to have exacted revenge for Custer’s defeat at
the Little Big Horn, Brown’s text fueled growing outrage against
injustices perpetuated by the federal government. It was a history that
reached beyond its subject and helped to define an era. It has remained
in print ever since.
To many, Brown’s
history inverted accounts of the American West. It substituted
Euro-American quests for frontier freedom with those of American Indians
“who already had it.” The problem was that in place of Indian
vilification Brown offered victimization. Despite their nobility and
fortitude, he suggested, Indians were still defeated. In his telling,
Native history became a slow, inexorable decline toward disappearance.
Twentieth-century “poverty, hopelessness and squalor,” he wrote, were
the outcomes for peoples who had lost and who remained lost.
This is your last article.
Start your free trial
Start your free trial
White
Americans have long defined the past through narratives of frontier
freedoms. Recently, however, historians have moved away from such
self-justifying accounts, and a growing field has made the experiences
of indigenous displacement, survival and resurgence a new pathway for
understanding the nation’s history. Celebratory accounts of European
settlement and expansion have increasingly passed into an antiquarian
realm, succeeded by studies of settler colonialism that approach the
past more comparatively as well as more cautiously.
Treuer
adeptly synthesizes these recent studies and fashions them with
personal, familial and biographic vignettes. He works hard to connect
the past with those who live with its ongoing legacies. An extended
account of his cousin’s history of reservation cage-fighting on their
home at Leech Lake, Minn., for example, effectively introduces Part 3 of
the book, “Fighting Life: 1914-1945,” which chronicles the astonishing
rates of Indian service in World Wars I and II.
Here, Treuer recalls heroes less familiar than the Indians of traditional histories. Joseph Oklahombi of
the Choctaw Nation received both the American Silver Star and the
French Croix de Guerre during World War I for capturing a German
machine-gun nest and “killing 79 before taking another 171 captive.” He
was, however, never “recommended for the Medal of Honor” — which, as
Treuer notes cuttingly, had been awarded to “20 of the troopers who
opened fire on unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee.” Even before the United
States joined the war in 1917, some Indian men had migrated into Canada
and joined other Native Americans, like Francis Pegahmagabow
(Ojibwe) from Wasauksing First Nation, whose service at Ypres, the
Somme and Passchendaele included “378 confirmed kills and the capture of
300 Germans.” These achievements made him “the most decorated soldier
(and certainly the most effective) in the Canadian Army.”
Advertisement
The
portraits of such early-20th-century individuals follow Treuer’s survey
of colonial and 19th-century history, where regional overviews of
Native North America are combined with the complex, multi-imperial
histories that forged colonial America and the young Republic. Readers
will find familiar analyses of the unrelenting, violent cupidity of
European explorers and, at times, subtle suggestions about the equally
relentless capacity of Indian communities adapting within the maelstrom
of early America.
Left to right, Deb Haaland; Natalie Diaz; Rebecca Sandefur; Peggy FlanaganCreditLeft to right: Brian Snyder/Reuters; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2); Jim Mone/Associated Press
Image
Through
the book’s second half, recounting developments since World War II,
Treuer’s counternarrative to Brown takes its fullest form. In
particular, his detailed assessments of what he calls “becoming Indian”
highlight the resiliency and dynamism of contemporary tribal
communities. Interrelated processes rooted in family and culture, he
suggests, undergird the continuing sovereignty of modern Indian tribes.
Such processes, he shows, are in fact ubiquitous. They are also deeply
personal. For instance, as he concludes about his mother’s adjuration to
maintain his family’s methods of ricing, hunting, sugaring and berry
harvesting, “sovereignty isn’t only a legal attitude or a political
reality.” Sovereignty is lived. It is inhabited, performed and enacted,
often on a daily basis. It can also become as empowering as it is
cherished: “To believe in sovereignty,” Treuer writes, “to move through
the world imbued with the dignity of that reality, is to resolve one of
the major contradictions of modern Indian life: It is to find a way to
be Indian and modern simultaneously.” As the political theorist Glen
Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) similarly suggests, culturally specific,
place-based relationships root Native peoples not only with their
homelands but also with ethical obligations and a moral worldview that
he terms “grounded normativity.”
Family,
relationships and place-based sovereignty are a major feature of
contemporary Native America, whose collective “heartbeat” has grown
stronger throughout the Self-Determination Era. The legacies of
conquest, however, continue, and Indian communities still endure
beleaguering disparities. They also continue to confront legal and
political challenges, as well as threats of violence. Treuer writes that
in recent years the United States Supreme Court has been “shaped by the
questions of community and obligation between the government and
several Indian nations.” But he might have noted as well that since 1978
the court has fashioned a “common law colonialism” that chips away at
the ability of tribal courts to enforce criminal and civil laws against
non-Indians, while environmental degradation and the extraction of
resources plague Indian communities disproportionately.
Increasingly,
colonial battles have moved from Wounded Knee to Congress, where Native
communities have, at times, been victorious. “In 2013, the Violence
Against Women Act (VAWA),” Treuer writes, “was reauthorized and
significantly revised. Among the new provisions was the empowerment of
tribal courts to charge and prosecute non-Natives who raped or assaulted
Native women on Native land.”
Such
statutory reforms offer tribal communities opportunities to reform
misguided court rulings, and political advocacy has become an effective
mechanism for protecting community members, enforcing environmental
regulations and further institutionalizing sovereign authority within
tribal communities. Indeed, working with Congress has become a common
feature of contemporary American Indian politics. Treuer speaks of “a
slew of laws” passed in the 1990s and 2000s that have empowered Native
peoples.
Threats to tribal
sovereignty, however, loom. Shortly after the VAWA reauthorization,
Dollar General Corporation took a case to the Supreme Court contesting
tribal authority over civil affairs. In 2016 it nearly won with a court
that divided 4 to 4. Legal challenges like this one have become among
the 21st century’s primary landscapes of confrontation.
Ultimately,
Treuer’s powerful book suggests the need for soul-searching about the
meanings of American history and the stories we tell ourselves about
this nation’s past. There is an urgency to fashion new national
narratives. Treuer’s suggestion, for example, that Indian peoples have
been infected by colonialism with a disease “of powerlessness … more
potent than most people imagine” could be extended to include the
subordination experienced by other gendered, racialized and historically
disempowered communities. This disease also has the potential to spread
even further, because it cannot simply be up to America’s indigenous
people to ward it off. As Treuer explains, “This disease is the story
told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves.”
Ned
Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is a professor of history and American
studies at Yale University, where he coordinates the Yale Group for the
Study of Native America.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Standing Tall. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Posts
