The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

“The year 1890 was not the end of us, our cultures, our civilizations. It was cruel, low, painful point, yes—maybe even the lowest point since European arrived in the New World—but a low point from which much of modern Indian and American life has emerged.” 

Treuer refers to the Battle at Wounded Knee—truly, a massacre, in which Lakota men, women, and children were murdered by the US Army. Though previous texts have focused on the tragic dimensions of the incident, particularly Dee Brown in his book Bury Me at Wounded Knee, Treuer seeks a revision of these previous histories and looks to describe how Indigenous peoples have restored themselves and their communities in response to this tragedy and others like it.

“Indians are not little ghosts in living color, stippling the landscape of the past and popping up in the present only to admonish contemporary Americans to behave.” 

Treuer grapples with the persistent image of the Indigenous American (one thinks, particularly, of the “crying Indian” in the public service announcement against littering in the 1970s) as the preserver of a more pristine and authentic American landscape. This figure lacks complexity and a full identity and exists only to show White Americans how to behave and properly treat a land over which the original peoples no longer have license or much agency.

“How did we get from Jamestown to Wounded Knee? As we will see, all the colonial powers used violence, strategic dependency, intermarriage, and religious conversion to create and maintain control. And in this process, language would be no less powerful a weapon: a rhetoric of rightful possession coupled with a narrative of Indian aggression, laziness, transgression, and paganism.” 

Echoing poet Audre Lorde’s pronouncement about being unable to use “the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house,” Treuer shows how the eradication of Indigenous languages in favor of English, particularly, not only worked to distance Indigenous peoples from their culture but gave their colonizers control over the narrative of their lives.

“Most Indians do not see themselves as merely the first in a long series of arrivals to North America; they see themselves as indigenous. And the belief in tribal indigeneity is crucial to understanding modern Indian realities. The rhetorical stance that Indians are merely one group of travelers with no greater stake than any other clashes with Indians’ cultural understanding that we have always been here and that our control over our place in this world—not to mention our control over the narrative and history of that place—has been deeply and unjustly eroded.”

Treuer combats the notion that (if the story of the land bridge migration is true) Indigenous people are a part of the nation’s larger immigrant narrative—excluding the experiences of African Americans who are descended from slaves. This rhetorical stance, as Treuer frames it, is an attempt to eliminate the calculated history of disenfranchisement.

“Still, contrary to the familiar narrative of erasure, wherein tribes (lumped together) were gradually reduced to nothingness by successive waves of first European and then American power, this history tells a more complicated and accurate story: tribes charted different courses and in the process embraced different fates.” 

Treuer explains the impetus of the book and how it differs from Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. His is a story that narrates not only the travails of Indigenous tribes but also their triumphs and the novel ways in which they’ve managed to survive, despite crushing poverty and oppression.

“Crowded together, enemies became neighbors, and relocated tribes were forced on those Indigenous to the region.” 

Treuer describes how relocation forced together tribes that had never before cohabited, either because they were enemies or because they were foreign to the regions in which they were pushed as a result of White settlement in their original homelands.

“[T]he Plains Indian culture of the nineteenth century was a relatively recent phenomenon which depended, in part, on innovations introduced by Europeans. It would be difficult to find a native group which better exemplified cultural change and adaptation, or one that gave a less accurate image of pre-Columbian America.” 

The Plains Indians were different from other tribes in their ability to use assimilation to their advantage, particularly the introductions of horses and firearms. They became so adept at managing both that they became a persistent challenge to the federal government.

“America did not conquer the West through superior technology, nor did it demonstrate the advantages of democracy. America ‘won’ the West by blood, brutality, and terror.” 

This statement from Treuer seems to reference Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which argued that European conquest was made possible through superior technology and the accident of pestilence, particularly influenza and smallpox. Instead, Treuer asserts that conquest was deliberate, not merely the result of fortune.

“The European colonial powers and later the American government had shown themselves to be feckless, cruel, shortsighted, hypocritical, and shameful in their dealings with the original owners of the country. Indians were gone from the East Coast, and on the other side of the country, they lived as tattered remnants around former mission communities in California. The entire United States had been ‘settled,’ and Indians had been broken, removed, and safely ‘settled,’ too, on reservations where they were expected to either die or become Americans.”

Treuer explains the results of European colonialism, particularly the efforts of the English, French, and Spanish to dispossess Indigenous people so that they could exploit and settle what they had claimed as the New World. In making what became the Americas “new,” the European settlers “erased” the Indigenous peoples by pushing them out of sight. Those who remained in their presence had to assimilate (e.g., by going to boarding schools and converting to Christianity) to survive.

“Most American Indians wouldn’t be considered citizens until 1924, although there were sometimes paths to citizenship in treaties or negotiations.” 

This legal stipulation depicts the outrageousness of White supremacy, which declared those who had originally inhabited the land as outsiders.

“Whereas the Blackfeet had, fifty years earlier, the millions-strong bison herd to feed them, now they had the bark of trees. And even in order to hunt they needed the permission of the Indian agent.” 

The Blackfeet of Montana had been starved out by the federal government, which was conspiring to push them off the land to make it habitable for White settlers. The land that had once belonged to the Blackfeet now belonged to a federal government that barely recognized them. Worse, the Indian agents who worked on their behalf were often corrupt and aligned with the forces that sought to diminish the Blackfeet and other Indigenous tribes.

“Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.” 

During a speech that he gave in Washington, DC, both to the federal government and to the general public, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce invoked the sacred concept of freedom to help White Americans sympathize with the plight of his tribe, which, like other Indigenous peoples, had been constricted by unfair practices meant to subordinate and disenfranchise its people. Chief Joseph astutely refers to the First Amendment rights of freedom of religion and speech to assert his citizenship and belief in American legal principles.

“To be culturally Indian and live in one’s Indian community was to be a savage.” 

Treuer explains how Indigenous cultures became synonymous with uncivilized life. Indigenous people who did not adopt White American ways were regarded as something apart from mainstream society and, thus, undeserving of its benefits.

“The actions and disposition of the government that appointed itself the guardian of Indian futures seemed designed to bring about the very ‘disappearing Indian’ that American culture so mythologized.” 

In this sentence, Treuer illustrates how the US government’s efforts to create boarding schools, allotment plans, and termination worked to eradicate real Indigenous tribes and communities, almost literally making them extinct.

“If the four hundred years of contact with Europeans showed anything, it wasn’t merely the rapaciousness of Europeans and European colonization or the terrible effectiveness of European diseases. Rather, it showed the supreme adaptability and endurance of Indian tribes across the continent. This adaptability and toughness served Indians well in the years between 1890 and 1934, when the assaults on Indians and Indian homelands were perhaps at their most creative, if not their bloodiest.”

Treuer attempts to revise the narrative around Indigenous peoples, making it less about those who conquered them and more about the survival mechanisms of those who were conquered. He starts in 1890, at the Battle of Wounded Knee, and ends in 1934, when the US government made some effort to address the needs of Indigenous tribes.

“Still, after the end of the Indian Wars, after allotment, after boarding schools, and after World War I, history was in many ways something that happened to Indians, not something they made. Or if they made it, it was (in the words of Karl Marx) not with tools of their own choosing.” 

Treuer describes the passive role that Indigenous people have played in US history. In instances in which they’ve exercised agency, as the Plains Indians did, it was with items that had been introduced by White settlers.

“Indians fought the government plan after plan, policy after policy, legislative act after legislative act, and they continued to fight. And they fought using their own governments, their own sensibilities, origin stories, legends, language, and creativity. And they fought to remain Indian just as much as they fought for and in order to be Americans, but Americans on their own terms.”

In this passage, Treuer seems to contradict his previous statements. However, he’s actually describing the evolution of Indigenous life in the United States. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Indigenous people were relegated to passive roles. In the post-World War II period, they asserted their rightful place within American life.

“The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful Indian men. That disease is more potent than most people imagine: that feeling that we’ve lost, that we’ve always lost, that we’ve already lost—our land, our cultures, our communities, ourselves. This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms.” 

This statement illustrates the self-defeatism that has plagued the Indigenous community, usually taking the forms of violence and alcoholism. Treuer reappropriates the trope of disease—the real afflictions of smallpox and influenza, which decimated tribes—and applies it to describe the psychological affliction of self-defeatism.

“People who had been in America before America existed, whose homeland the wide country had once been, were now homeless immigrants headed to cities across the country, like the immigrants from China, Germany, Italy, Ireland, and England before them. They ran into many of the same difficulties: segregation in crowded ghettos or enclaves, lack of access to education, and lack of access to capital as redlining prevented them from joining the millions of Americans who were enjoying homeownership and admission to the middle class.” 

In an ironic twist of fate, those who were never immigrants ended up sharing fates similar to those, mostly European, immigrants who first arrived in the United States. The difference was that Indigenous peoples were steadfastly prevented from joining American life through various forms of discrimination. Their experience with redlining parallels that of African Americans who hoped to buy homes but were obstructed by discriminatory housing policies.

“Federal policy isn’t abstract unless you’re rich. If you’re not, it is not something that affects your life and your blood and your bones.” 

Treuer’s statement echoes his later assertions in the book about how federal programs, particularly those administered during Johnson’s presidency in the 1960s, helped many Indigenous people in their communities to improve conditions for themselves.

“Hundreds of years of being missionized, colonized, reservationized, mainstreamed, marginalized, and criminalized had had a pernicious effect on Indian self-regard. How not to think of oneself as less, how not to think of oneself and one’s place as at the bottom of hierarchical America after being downtrodden for a century?” 

Treuer describes how years of subjugation and systemic racism convinced Indigenous people that they lacked worth and rights to citizenship and opportunity. He poses the rhetorical question after cataloging the Indigenous community’s indignities to make it clear to the reader that this was the only possible outcome.

“The received notion—reinforced at every turn in editorials and investigative pieces and popular culture—is that reservations are where Indians go to suffer and die. They are seen by many Indians as well as non-Indians not as expressions of tribal survival, however, twisted or flawed, but as little more than prisons or concentration camps, expressions of the perversion of American democratic ideals into greed—greed rapacious enough to take Indian land and decimate Indian populations but not quite harsh enough to annihilate us outright.” 

The reservation, which Treuer describes elsewhere in the book as a place where Indigenous people are confined to a world of alcoholism, domestic abuse, and poverty, is juxtaposed with prisons to underscore the sense that Indigenous people are treated as a problem to solve, and with concentration camps to emphasize the understanding that they are undesirables, best kept out of sight.

“Culture isn’t carried in the blood, and when you measure blood, in a sense you measure racial origins. Or, more accurately, you measure the social construct that race is. Culture is carried on in many ways—kinship, geography, language, religion, lifeways, habits, and even gestures—but not in blood.” 

Treuer challenges some Indigenous tribes’ embrace of the blood rule as the criterion for membership in a tribe and access to its privileges, arguing that it coincides with the racial myths that were used to subjugate his people.